McKnight Principles

As our business grows, it becomes increasingly necessary to delegate responsibility and to encourage men and women to exercise their initiative. This requires considerable tolerance. Those men and women, to whom we delegate authority and responsibility, if they are good people, are going to want to do their jobs in their own way.

Mistakes will be made. But if a person is essentially right, the mistakes he or she makes are not as serious in the long run as the mistakes management will make if it undertakes to tell those in authority exactly how they must do their jobs.

Management that is destructively critical when mistakes are made kills initiative. And it's essential that we have many people with initiative if we are to continue to grow. - William L. McKnight, 3M

McKnight Principles

A Century of Innovation

A Century of Innovation is a celebration of the values and innovative thinking that makes 3M unique. Perseverance, ingenuity and creativity have made 3M's first 100 years a century of success.

For years, people around the world have looked to 3M for products and ideas that solve problems and make their lives easier and better. Our achievements are the foundation of a proud past and the bright future of many innovations to come.

We have a history of investing in the communities in which we operate by providing jobs for local residents and supporting education, the environment, and social and economic development. 3M also is recognized as a leader in environmental protection and a pioneer in pollution prevention.

Much of 3M's rich culture comes from the principles that William L. McKnight, former President and Chairman of the Board, set forth. McKnight believed "management that is destructively critical when mistakes are made kills initiative. It's essential that we have many people with initiative if we are to continue to grow." It is this growth that continues to make 3M a leader in the 21st century.

The 3M Story

Read about the first 100 years of 3M, a global, diversified technology company committed to providing practical and ingenious solutions to help customers succeed.

A Century of Innovation The 3M Story (pdf, 6.82 MB)

Crooked Timber » » Money Ruins Everything

Dan Hunter and I have a paper coming out in the Hastings Communications and Entertainment Law Journal, which economic and technical innovation is increasingly based on developments that don’t rely on economic incentive or public provision. The main examples, obvious enough for readers here, include open source software, blogs and associated technical and social innovations, and wikis. Abstract and links to SSRN over the fold.

Paper is at SSRN (not paywalled, I hope)

Abstract:
In the economy of the 21st century, economic and technical innovation is increasingly based on developments that don’t rely on economic incentive or public provision. Unlike 20th century innovation, the most important developments in innovation have been driven not by research funded by governments or developed by corporations but by the collaborative interactions of individuals. In most cases, this modality of innovation has not been motivated by economic concerns or the prospect of profit. This raises the possibility of a world in which some of the sectors of the economy particularly the ones dealing with innovation and creativity are driven by social interactions of various kinds, rather than by profit-oriented investment. This article examines the development of this amateur modality of creative production, and explains how it came to exist. It then deals with why this modality is different from and potentially inconsistent with the typical modalities of production that are at the heart of modern views of innovation policy. It provides a number of policy prescriptions that should be used by governments to recognize the significance of amateur innovation, and to further the development of amateur productivity.

Crooked Timber » » Money Ruins Everything

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The Future of Ideas is now Free

After a productive and valuable conversation with my publisher, Random House, they've agreed to permit The Future of Ideas to be licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license. You can download the book for free here, or above.

This means all four of my books are now CC licensed. Code (v1) was licensed under a BY-SA license; so too, Code (v2). And Free Culture and now The Future of Ideas are licensed under BY-NC licenses.

I am particularly glad that The Future of Ideas is now freely licensed. That book hit the stores 2 weeks after September 11. I'm glad it now has a chance to flow a bit more freely.

7 Habits of Highly Innovative People

Dont like the original article, but these resources sound good.

External Resources on Creative Thinking and Innovation (books contain affiliates id):

• Book: Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention
• TED Talk: Sir Ken Robinson
• TED Talk: Larry Lessig
• Book: Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques
• About Creativity: Interview with Ze Frank
• Scott Berkun: Creative thinking hacks.
• Pick The Brain: The Secret to Creativity

NineSigma: Nurturing 'Open Innovation'

Why should a company pursue an open innovation strategy?

Here's one example of the benefits. We had a client who was selling laundry detergent in prepackaged pouches. The problem was that the plastic pellets holding the liquid detergent were leaking, staining the packaging, and so sales were tanking. The company had its packaging people working on it, the manufacturing people were working on it, the supplier of the plastic pellets was working on it, and no one could come up with a solution. Our search turned up a small, unheard-of company in Britain that was packaging agricultural concentrates—herbicides, pesticides, that kind of stuff—in a similar type of film. They had had, and solved, a similar problem along the way, and their solution could be adapted to our client's problem. So our client's solution came from a company that no one had heard of in an unrelated industry.

But if you define a problem too narrowly, do you risk limiting the very promise of the open innovation approach? How do you cast a wide net but not catch junk?

First, you need to clearly identify a client's most pressing problem or problems. Then you need to translate the problem into basic science or technology terms. So, for instance, when P&G wanted to solve the problem of wrinkled cotton, we didn't send out a request for proposals saying we were looking for a solution to wrinkling because if you describe the problem in terms of its applications, the only solutions you get are from people working in that industry. So instead we talked about surface chemistry and hydrogen-bonding across fibers—the language of science and tech that is understood across industries.

A Struggle Between Efficiency And Creativity

Traditionally, 3M had been a place where researchers had been given wide latitude to pursue research down whatever alleys they wished. After the arrival of the new boss, the DMAIC process was laid over a phase-review process for innovations—a novelty at 3M. The goal was to speed up and systematize the progress of inventions into the new-product pipeline. The DMAIC questions "are all wonderful considerations, but are they appropriate for somebody who's just trying to...develop some ideas?" asks Boyd. The impact of the Six Sigma regime, according to Boyd and other former 3Mers, was that more predictable, incremental work took precedence over blue-sky research. "You're supposed to be having something that was going to be producing a profit, if not next quarter, it better be the quarter after that," Boyd says.

For a long time, 3M had allowed researchers to spend years testing products. Consider, for example, the Post-it note. Its inventor, Art Fry, a 3M scientist who's now retired, and others fiddled with the idea for several years before the product went into full production in 1980. Early during the Six Sigma effort, after a meeting at which technical employees were briefed on the new process, "we all came to the conclusion that there was no way in the world that anything like a Post-it note would ever emerge from this new system," says Michael Mucci, who worked at 3M for 27 years before his dismissal in 2004. (Mucci has alleged in a class action that 3M engaged in age discrimination; the company says the claims are without merit.)

There has been little formal research on whether the tension between Six Sigma and innovation is inevitable. But the most notable attempt yet, by Wharton School professor Mary Benner and Harvard Business School professor Michael L. Tushman, suggests that Six Sigma will lead to more incremental innovation at the expense of more blue-sky work. The two professors analyzed the types of patents granted to paint and photography companies over a 20-year period, before and after a quality improvement drive. Their work shows that, after the quality push, patents issued based primarily on prior work made up a dramatically larger share of the total, while those not based on prior work dwindled.

Defenders of Six Sigma at 3M claim that a more systematic new-product introduction process allows innovations to get to market faster. But Fry, the Post-it note inventor, disagrees. In fact, he places the blame for 3M's recent lack of innovative sizzle squarely on Six Sigma's application in 3M's research labs. Innovation, he says, is "a numbers game. You have to go through 5,000 to 6,000 raw ideas to find one successful business." Six Sigma would ask, why not eliminate all that waste and just come up with the right idea the first time? That way of thinking, says Fry, can have serious side effects. "What's remarkable is how fast a culture can be torn apart," says Fry, who lives in Maplewood, Minn., just a few minutes south of the corporate campus and pops into the office regularly to help with colleagues' projects. "[McNerney] didn't kill it, because he wasn't here long enough. But if he had been here much longer, I think he could have."

Six Sigma: So Yesterday?