Creative Destruction: 3M's 7 pillars of Innovation

This article was summarised from an article in Business Week online last week, and identifies what 3M believe to be the route to their success in bring out a stream of new products:

1. Investing in R+D

2. The corporate culture must be actively maintained.

3. Innovation is impossible without a broad base of technology.

4. Formal and informal networking

5. Set individual expectations and reward employees for outstanding work.

6. Quantify efforts.

7. Research must be tied to the customer.

Examining this list it is easy to say "those are obvious", and indeed they are. Consider how difficult it is though to remain really customer focussed when a company grows. Many become inward looking, and while revenue remains in the short term, why face the world?

When you conduct research, who do you choose to be part of the research team? How do you convince the inventor types that the customer is really important? Or to listen to the person who has been parachuted into the team from marketing?

How easy is it to assess the culture of a company without just taking a litmus test and thinking everything will be OK?

If your company strives to be like 3M, how do you think that you could maintain all 7 pillars for 104 years!