How big of a deal is creating these innovative 3M culture principles for your business? In this blog, we will highlight important principles of 3M culture to your company. As you will see, they certainly consider this culture a very big deal.
The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get the old ones out. – Dee Hock
Consider these factoids on the importance of creativity and an innovative workplace culture pulled from various studies:
“Creativity is the most important leadership quality, according to CEOs.” IBM Global CEO Study, “The Enterprise of the Future”
“Seventy‐eight percent of Millennials were strongly influenced by how innovative a company was when deciding if they wanted to work there.” The Deloitte Millennial Survey, 2014
“Employing a worker in a creative occupation is an innovation input in a similar manner to employing a scientist.” The Creative Economy Report, London School of Economics, 2008
Not surprisingly, we also think an innovative workplace culture is a pretty big deal, and we’re glad we’re not alone on that.
Culture. It’s probably a word you hear often if you follow blogs on entrepreneurship or read articles on business and management. But what is it exactly?
According to Frances Frei and Anne Morriss at Harvard Business Review:
“Culture guides discretionary behavior and it picks up where the employee handbook leaves off. Culture tells us how to respond to an unprecedented service request. It tells us whether to risk telling our bosses about our new ideas, and whether to surface or hide problems. Employees make hundreds of decisions on their own every day, and culture is our guide. Culture tells us what to do when the CEO isn’t in the room, which is, of course, most of the time.”
This post will cover all of the elements that make great culture. Each culture has different tactics and unique qualities. But, universally, culture is about the employees and making sure they have a fun and productive working environment.
The workplace should not be something that people dread every day, should it? Employees should look forward to going to their jobs. In fact, they should have a hard time leaving because they enjoy the challenges, their co-workers, and the atmosphere. Jobs shouldn’t provoke stress in employees. While the work may be difficult, the culture shouldn’t add to the stress of the work. On the contrary, culture should be designed to alleviate work-related stress.
This is why culture matters so much. Culture sustains employee enthusiasm and engagement
You want engaged employees because engagement and happiness mean more productivity. And when a business is more productive, that means it is working faster; and when it works faster, it can get a leg up on the competition. So it’s worth the investment for companies to build and nourish their culture.
3M takes a long-term approach to innovation and new product development process by creating a culture that encourages risk-taking, tolerates mistakes made along the way, and rewards achievement. A culture of innovation means that senior management encourages employees to spend a significant portion of their time on products and research that goes beyond their usual scope of responsibilities.
Related: Studying Innovative Change for Creative Business Ideas
The manufacturing conglomerate — an abrasives maker that broke out by inventing masking tape in 1925 — is introducing new products as if it were a startup.
3M capitalizes on its innovation success by combining diverse technologies in new and unexpected ways. They draw upon innovative technologies from its portfolio of 55,000 products to create new solutions, such as using dental technology applied to car parts. By making these uncommon connections, the company pioneers new innovation processes.
Long before Google gave its engineers one day a week to pursue their own ideas, 3M let its researchers do the same with up to 15% of their time.
In another unusual practice, 3M awards annual Genesis Grants, worth as much as $100,000, to company scientists for research. The money is allocated by their peers and is spent on typically higher-risk projects.
3M Keys to Creating an Innovative Workplace Culture
The company, as a result, has in place a goal to generate 30% of revenue from new products introduced in the past five years.
It’s about inventing hundreds and hundreds of Next Small Things, year after year.
So how does 3M get these great results from its innovation culture? What constitutes that innovative workplace culture at 3m?
Here are ten ways 3M senior management builds an innovative workplace culture.
Provide direction
Company leadership points the way and lets team members throughout the organization run with opportunities to innovate.
My takeaway:
It is a sound leadership style to empower employees as much as possible.
Invite broad collaboration
Diverse participants from varied levels and areas of the company, plus customers, outside experts, and other relevant parties are included in innovation efforts.
The scientists formed an organization called the Technical Forum in 1951. It invites all of the company’s 9,700 R&D personnel to an annual symposium, where everyone can see what everyone else is working on. Labs also host their own conferences and Webcasts and elect representatives to a governing body to set policy.
My takeaway:
Collaboration is one of the key enablers of innovation as innovation rarely starts from a single spark, but rather a collaboration of many smart contributors.
Meaningfully engage and involve employees
Innovation team members receive training, structure, and access to opportunities that take the best advantage of their knowledge and expertise to innovate.
My takeaway:
Lots of employee engagement positives outside of innovation here. A very good secondary result, isn’t it?
Encourage change
There’s a continual push to challenge past strategies and anticipate what the future holds to increase the value delivered to important audiences.
My takeaway:
Again, great secondary benefits to this approach. Supporting change indicates the business is constantly examining business adaptation.
Pursue smart possibilities
There are clear processes in place to explore, assess, and prioritize the best innovation opportunities and meaningfully propel the organization forward.
Stay agile
Despite a quickly changing environment, there is a focus on what’s most important for the organization’s success while embracing a willingness to change direction rapidly when necessary.
Celebrate progress and success
For all the fanfare about celebrating failures, an innovative workplace culture recognizes and celebrates trying and learning progress and determination, AND success.
The folks who call themselves 3Mers take pride in discoveries that lead to real-world products. Management reinforces this by fostering a dual-career ladder so veteran researchers can continue to move up without becoming managers. It also honors hundreds of employees — nominated and selected by their peers — for scientific achievements every year. And it gives the top 20 overachievers and their spouses a four-day holiday at 3M’s corporate retreat.
My takeaway:
Recognizing results is a great way to demonstrating the value of a company’s human capital. It also builds the innovative culture the company is so committed to.
Show commitment
One sure way to show that is with money. In 2005, 3M spent $1.24 billion on research and development, or 6% of its $21.2 billion in revenue. That’s an unusually high amount for an industrial manufacturer. And of that R&D outlay, a fifth went to basic research or pursuits that have no immediate practicality.
My takeaway:
Investment is certainly a measure of innovation commitment, necessary, but unfortunately not sufficient. Other measures of commitment are needed, such as celebrating even small successes by upper management.
Maintain the culture
Newcomers also quickly learn the stories of how 3M developed the first audiotapes, for instance, or Scotchgard. Tribes and peoples keep their cultures alive through oral histories; so does 3M.
My takeaway:
A company’s culture is important for its employees to understand priorities and how things can get done. Stories of the past successes are the best way to enhance corporate culture.
Manage a broad base of technology
For instance, 3M claims to have leading know-how in 42 diverse technologies. That allows researchers to take an idea from one realm and apply it to another.
My takeaway:
The more dots you have to connect, the more new ideas you will find.
The bottom line
In conclusion, our biggest takeaway is simply that everything you are exposed to makes a connection. It’s how one puts them together that will optimize your success and collaboration is the key.
3M’s innovation and new product development clearly have this figured out.
