3m Business Model

711 Words3 Pages
What if your boss said you could just daydream and play six hours each week, on the company's dime? A startling idea for those with stodgy supervisors, this is precisely what 3M Corp. asks of its scientists. For decades, engineers at the St. Paul, Minnesota, company have spent up to 15 percent of work hours on their own projects, playing with ideas that have nothing to do with their job's mission. This unwritten rule of 15 percent dream time is so ingrained at 3M that "you can feel it right down to your toes," as one scientist put it. 3M bets heavily that informal, bottom-up scientific percolation will lead to profitable products, a wager reflected in its demands that 30 percent of each division's sales come from products less than four years old. And, of course, experimentation begets innovation. The 15 percent rule works a remarkable amount of the time; the best-known success story is scientist Art Fry's creation of Post-its while trying to create bookmarks that would stay put in the church choir's hymnals. By combining various paper coatings with a 3M colleague's adhesive invention, he made the first sticky notes. John Martens, a scientist in 3M's industrial specialties division, says the 15 percent idea is "more of a philosophy that says you [can] pursue ideas of your own making.... And they can be totally outside what 3M is currently involved in." Martens knows all about this. On 15 percent time in the late 1970s, he developed a polymer that hardens instantly when exposed to ultraviolet light. It was a cool concept, but sat gathering dust for years, until the laptop boom got 3M fired up about making "miles and miles of lenses cheaply." The lenses allow computers to project light onto the monitor in the most energy-efficient way possible, but old-fashioned processes to make them were time consuming. 3M's aggressive cross-pollination within the company

More about 3m Business Model

Open Document