INNOVATION-3M

Innovation-3M

Innovation-3M

Outline

We have selected 3M for the purpose of this assignment. Despite the successful business track record that large corporations invariably show, their sheer size sometimes hinders their ability to respond rapidly to changes in technology, market, and consumer preference. It also affects the ability of 3M to innovate consistently. Our model builds on recent theoretical advances in the understanding of the innovation process, placing a strong emphasis on the need for people to interact across business units at 3M.

Company Overview

3M is a company with over 60,000 products. In fact, it is one of only a few fortune 50 companies that consistently maintain a ratio of nearly one product per employee. Thus, 3M would be considered a highly innovative company, able to draw on its technical knowledge base to produce capital-producing products for the benefit of its shareholders as well as for the benefit of society.

While the success of 3M is based in part to its culture of innovation, creativity and growth, a lot of it can be attributed to its diversity. Unlike companies such as Dell, Amoco, or Ford, 3M has penetrated many different markets. In order to produce products in different or independent markets, 3M has diversified its technical staff to include scientists, medical doctors, mechanical engineers, optical physicists, computer programmers, statisticians, etc. In companies with such diversity in technical employee profiles, there also exists a diversity of organizations at the divisional level. Within divisions, there often exist groups working in different products, in research, in design, etc. Additionally, some functional groups in a large global company such as 3M may be co-located away from headquarters. The multiplicity of corporate stratification creates group isolation and also bureaucratic systems that hamper quick knowledge diffusion. Thus, if an improvement method for the commercialization and technology transfer can be identified for an already innovative and successful enterprise such as 3M, it may follow that such a model is promising for many organizations.

In some areas, large companies, such as 3M, have a difficult time competing precisely because they cannot react to market trends, technological advances, customer requests or competitor moves as quickly as smaller competitors can. This is the paradox many large corporations face: How to leverage their resource advantage while acting as quickly, efficiently and effectively as more nimble and specialized, newer, and smaller organizations.

Large companies tend to maintain highly focused technical groups. At the level of these focused groups, the capital creation aspect of the technology transfer tends to erode at least partially, and an understanding of developments in other groups within the organization is often missing. The aggregate of these two elements compounded with isolationism from non-technical groups including marketing, planning, sales and upper management is typical in large organizations. This combination tends to create a gap in the technology transfer process. 3M, a successful and innovative organization, is no exception.

One way for large organizations to act more nimble and deal better with the paradox of being large is to incorporate a better technology transfer ...