R&D at 3M

WSJ has interviewed 3M CEO Mr. Buckley in the article At 3M, Innovation Comes in Tweaks and Snips. Even though the article title is about innovation, the actual interview has some excellent points about effective R&D management, skill-set management and motivation.

Senior leaders can reinvigorate an area just by making sure the team knows and feels that the area is important to them:

“Mr. Buckley: I remember my meeting with Chris Holmes [who heads 3M’s abrasives business]. I had been in the company maybe a month. During a business review I said, ‘Tell me what is going on in abrasives. What innovations are we doing?’ Chris said we were doing this and that, but abrasives [were] not considered sexy. I said, ‘Why not? I think abrasives are sexy. Why can’t abrasives be sexy?’ I think it’s those simple comments to people who have been convinced over a period of years that they are unimportant. Chris was utterly inspired by that.
Innovation and outside the box thinking is not cheap. Creativity requires significant commitment of resources and recognition at C level

WSJ: How else do you get your people to be creative? Mr. Buckley: Everybody wants to find out how to can creativity. You can’t. Creativity comes from freedom, not control. We let all the people in the R&D community spend 15% of their time researching whatever they like.
Innovation is not always targeted towards a brand new market. It can be a new way to manufacture a product to give the company a competitive advantage.

Mr. Buckley: It was finding ways to simplify how you make the lowest-cost high-performance respirator possible.
We often think innovation is making a breakthrough at the top of the pyramid. That’s often not where the hardest challenges are. The hardest challenges are often: How do I make a breakthrough for next to nothing?
R&D management improvement is not conducive to Six Sigma like processes. R&D is discontinuous and requires management insight

I don’t know because it isn’t a process. [The quality-improvement process] Six Sigma’s worked wonderfully in our factories, but we tried it in our labs and it doesn’t work. It’s obvious why. The creative process, whether it is with me or anybody else,is a discontinuous process. You can’t say if I put more money in it I am going to get more out.
Hands-on senior management that walks the lab has enormous value -both in motivation and in efficiency/results.

WSJ: How often do you go to the labs?
Mr. Buckley: It’s dangerous when I go over. I’m told, “Every time George goes over to the labs he gets a new idea for a new product.” I probably go once every two weeks.

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Ideation Tools for Your Mobile

ZDNet has a list of ideation and idea management tools for different mobile tools. Some of them are even free. I think it is great that we can capture ideas any where and queue them up for discussion.

The new clients all come as part of the innovation management platform provided by Spigit, Kindling, and just yesterday, Imaginatik, Each let’s you suggest and evaluate ideas, but in slightly different ways.

…

Brightidea Mobile Back in February, BrightIdea announced it’s mobile client for the iPhone and iPad as well as Android devices. With BrightIdea Mobile, users can view, post, comment, vote, and share ideas. They can also use Brightidea’s corporate micro-blogging feature to post and follow activity within their innovation community.

I find interesting how Innovation has become a favorite buzz word. The title of the article “4 Innovation Management Tools for Your Mobile.” I think there is a great deal of hard work between discussing ideas and developing innovative new products. I guess in my book, innovation is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration!

Frugal Engineering

The central tenet behind every frugal engineering decision is maximizing value to the customer while minimizing nonessential costs. The term frugal engineering was coined in 2006 by Renault Chief Executive Carlos Ghosn to describe the competency of Indian engineers in developing products like Tata Motors’ Nano, the pint-sized, low-cost automobile.

Typically, when a well-established automaker designs and builds an inexpensive car, the company’s thinking is biased by decades of practices and procedures, and by its relationships with employees, customers, and suppliers. The approach reuses existing designs and relies on existing components. In essence, these companies start with a more expensive car and focus on ways to make it cheaper. That may count as a form of cost cutting, but it is not frugal engineering.

Instead, frugal engineering is an overarching philosophy that enables a true “clean sheet” approach to product development. Cost discipline is an intrinsic part of the process, but rather than simply cutting existing costs, frugal engineering seeks to avoid needless costs in the first place. It recognizes that merely removing features from existing products to sell them cheaper in emerging markets is a losing game. That’s because emerging-market customers have unique needs that usually aren’t addressed by mature-market products, and because the cost base of developed world products, even when stripped down, remains too high to allow competitive prices and reasonable profits in the developing world.

Clearly, going after new markets and new customer demographic can be better achieved with a clean sheet approach. Of course there is also a cost associated! It is expensive to start with a clean sheet. Each R&D organization will need to balance between disruptive and sustaining R&D. The article suggests three main ingredients for disruptive projects:

Cross-functional teams

Non-traditional supply-chain

Top-down support

I think I would add one of my own: Processes, tools and Metrics to ensure disruptive projects do not disrupt all the R&D. What do you think