Page 260 - Grow from Within Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation
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Appendix B 245
up leadership positions with a new 3M division dedicated to
the new business. Starting in 1984, teams could also find sup-
port from a corporate grant program to fund research that had
not yet qualified for budget support through ordinary channels.
In the 1990s, the company selected strategic program areas and
provided additional corporate-level funding.
Attempts by other companies to implement 3M’s practices
often failed, as entrenched incentives and processes thwarted
such flexibility. It usually was not possible to transplant the
innovative practices and culture of 3M to other corporate con-
texts. Commenting on 3M’s practice of giving employees 15
percent of their time to work on projects of personal interest,
Dr. Nelson Levy, a former vice president of R&D and president
of various global pharmaceutical companies, quipped at a Kel-
logg Innovation Network meeting in 2004, “I might as well
give my people 15 percent paid leave!”
In your company, can you imagine people doing end runs
around their bosses? How risky would that be for their careers?
Gifford Pinchot, in a 1987 article in Research Management, pro-
vides a compelling example of how the culture and leadership
at Hewlett-Packard allowed for this. David Packard bestowed
an Award for Meritorious Defiance, “For contempt and defi-
ance above and beyond the call of engineering duty,” upon a
Hewlett-Packard researcher in 1982. That researcher, Charles
House, in response to Packard’s demand that a project be ter-
minated—Packard instructed, “When I come back to this lab-
oratory next year, I don’t want to see this product in the
lab”—had instead adopted an alternative interpretation and,
with the tacit approval of his local management, moved the
product into manufacturing and successful sales within the
year! Can you imagine this happening at your company?
Note that we do not recommend that companies attempt to
adopt the practices of the historical 3M or HP unless they have