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REV: JULY 23, 2002

STEFAN THOMKE

Innovation at 3M Corporation (A)
On the evening of October 23, 1997, Rita Shor, senior product specialist at 3M, looked across the conference room at her team from the Medical-Surgical Markets Division. She wondered when to draw to close the intense ongoing debate on the nature of the team’s recommendations to the Health
Care Unit’s senior management. A hand-picked group of talented individuals, the team had embarked on a new method for understanding customer needs called “Lead User Research.” But this initiative to introduce leading-edge market research methods into 3M’s legendary innovation process had now grown into a revolutionary series of recommendations that threatened to rip apart the division. While senior management wanted the “Lead User” team to execute a manageable project involving surgical draping material to protect surgery patients from infections, the team now wanted to rewrite the entire business unit’s strategy statement to also include more pro-active products or services that would permit the upstream containment of infectious agents such as germs. This went against the incrementalist approach that for so long had pervaded 3M. After all, as Mary Sonnack, division scientist and an internal 3M consultant on the new Lead User methodology, noted “3M gets so much revenue from incremental products . . . like a blue Post-it note instead of just a yellow one.”
Outside the window, the late autumn breeze rippled through the tall Minnesota grass—a seasonal reminder that it had been a year since the group first embarked on the Lead User process (see Exhibit
1). The method, including training, had called for less than six months dedicated to the entire process. But the lengthy commitment from participants as well as 3M senior management might just
pay