This is the second business paper I’ve read this week while reading along with my son’s university studies. The first is discussed here if you’re interested. This paper is better written, but more academic in its style. This ironically makes it harder to read, because its grammar style is more complicated and harder to parse.
The take aways for me from this paper is that 3M is good at encouraging serendipity and opportune moments that create innovation. This is similar to Google’s attempts to build internal peer networks and deliberate lack of structure. In 3M’s case its partially expressed as 15% time, which is similar to Google’s 20% time. Specifically, “eureka moments” cannot be planned or scheduled, but require prior engagement.
chance favors only the prepared mind — Pasteur
3M has a variety of methods for encouraging peer networks, including technology fairs, “bootlegging” (borrowing idle resources from other teams), innovation grants, and so on.
At the same time, 3M tries to keep at least a partial focus on events driving by schedules. The concept of time is important here — there is a “time to wait” (we are ahead of the market); “a time in between” (15% time); and “a time across” (several parallel efforts around related innovations to speed up the process).
The idea of “a time to wait” is quite interesting. 3M has a history of discovering things where there is no current application, but somehow corporately remembering those things so that when there are applications years later they can jump in with a solution. They embrace story telling as part of their corporate memory, as well as a way of ensuring they learn from past success and failure.
Finally, 3M is similar to Google in their deliberate flexibility with the rules. 15% time isn’t rigidly counted for example — it might be 15% a week, or 15% of a year, or more or less than that. As long as it can be justified as a good use of resources its ok.
This was a good read and I enjoyed it.