3m - Three Roads to Innovation

Three Roads to innovation

1.

3M constantly try to find new ways to create a culture through their business that supports innovation. Some of the ways in which they focus on to achieve this are developing new technologies and applications for them.  

They start this by evaluating customer needs and anticipating market tends. 3M strive at making innovation their main and top priority. Innovation is included and made a part of their business strategy and plan in order to achieve an innovative culture in all aspects of their business. 3M gives its scientist freedom to explore their creativity in any given project as well as all the resources needed risk taking in order to achieve successful results overall when exploring new ideas. 3M had management sponsorship, where senior managers encourage and support innovation, recognise and reward failure .Researchers are encouraged to nurture and focus on one channel of innovation in order to increase the percentage of achieving the best and most successful work however researcher are also encouraged to use 15% of their time on projects of their own, however they also created a cross functional team in order to speed the development process. 3M motivates its employees by recognizing innovations and rewarding innovators with promotions using its dual ladder system of promotions and the practice of promoting from with in the organization. 2 examples of this are the Golden step program which honors cross-functional teams that introduces successful new products and the Carleton society, a hall of fame for 3M scientist that honor long rang contributions to 3M’s products and technology leadership. 3M constantly changes and adapts to new ways to increase innovation by implementing new strategies. The company aims at achieving a 25% growth each year though new products developed within the last 5 years. To insure innovation the company increased the ratio of spending on R&D from 4.6% of sales to 6.5%. 3M continue to enhance the chances of successful innovation for the overall to be continued quality growth in innovation.

2.

In the companies early years 3M’s president William L. McKnight came up with a set of policies and philosophies that held strong for more that 6 decades. McKnight believed that failure is not fatal. Freedom to make mistakes is a good policy and is part of the innovation process, as long as ones mistakes is not a ticket to oblivion which led the company to push its employees in order to speed up at inventing or upgrading products that will meet customer expectation. McKnight developed philosophies like the 15% option to spent time on projects they choose, management sponsorship and a dual- ladder system of promotion. Which meant that laboratory employees could progress up a technical ladder, as well as a management ladder while working on their original projects. McKnight’s philosophy’s have constantly been used and have been relied on; however, recently new management has constructed a new set of strategies to reinforce the innovation philosophy. 3M conduct their research and development on 3 levels , Division laboratories, section laboratories and Corporate Laborites. Division Lab. develops products and technology on a short-term scale, Sector Lab. Work on technology and applications on a longer time frame usually between 3 to 10 years and corporate lab. Conduct research that may not lead to products even up to 20 years 3M allows its employees to take risks and encourage their experiments. Sharing technologies and these laboratories recourses across the company is top importance from 3M’s standpoint. One of the critical issues facing the company is to continually focus activities to achieve quality growth.