Innovative science and technology commercialization strategies at 3M:: a case study

Large, successful firms, even with a history of innovation, may create organizational mechanisms that hamper innovation and customer response. This paper will describe how 3M purposefully fights this tendency by attempting to foster innovation within the company through the development of efficient strategies to commercialize technology in rapidly changing environments. The paper will describe 3M's general policies and its entrepreneurial culture, which are largely well publicized in the popular literature. But the focus will be on on-going strategies to accelerate the commercialization of technology in its electronic business. Specifically, the case of the Electronic Markets Center (EMC), a 3M Electronic and Communications Group unit created in 1997 to leverage the broad range of 3M's electronic products and technologies will be described and analyzed. Fifteen business units were organized around one single entity to more effectively ensure an overall coordinated strategy for 3M in the electronics market that could change the growth rate of 3M's sales to the electronic industry from 9% per year to 24% per year. The paper will focus on two critical components of the EMC: (1) what were the strategies behind the design of EMC; (2) how did EMC developed processes to manage the interdependence of the technical and business understanding of industry segments and the relations with key accounts. The paper concludes with lessons learned from the 3M experience thus far, and with recommendations on how to fight some of the barriers to innovation and technology commercialization in large firms. (C) 2002 Published, by Elsevier Science B.V.