How 3M Fosters a Culture of Collaboration

Great article in Business Week on how 3M encourages (and, more importantly, rewards & recognizes) collaboration.

From the article:

"What can executives learn from 3M's approach to collaboration?

Support networks. Build Web-based social networks that help employees with a problem find those with an answer. Support grassroots networking initiatives such as 3M's TechForum—an employee-run group that organizes speaker events to stimulate thinking and also serves as a kind of mixer, where scientists from different labs or divisions can connect in person.
Build collaboration into your employee evaluation system. Reward employees not just for developing an innovative technology, idea, or process, but for spreading it. No company reaps the benefits of collaboration if their employees or managers are hoarding innovation in order to look good at the next quarterly meeting.
Encourage curiosity. 3M allows employees to spend 15% of their time on projects of their choosing, giving them permission to develop ideas or technologies that may be outside of their regular work focus. Such policies increase the odds of collaboration, as the path of curiosity often leads employees beyond their knowledge base, to a place where they need the advice and insight of others.
Create innovation funds. Group or department managers focused on core-related projects often don't want to spend money exploring or developing innovative ideas. To overcome this common roadblock, companies should create an alternative source—3M calls these Genesis Grants—that employees can go to for funding of innovation projects that don't fit neatly into existing departments."

Great Real World Example of Ideation In Action

From the British Quality Foundation blog comes a great example of the power of soliciting ideas from your employees. They tout a simple, yet effective, system to collect ideas from all employees via a company-sponsored website.

Some of the factors that we at DiscoveryCast believe are contributing to their success include:

* effective reward/recognition program
* the use of a leaderboard to show which departments are contributing the most ideas and thereby having the largest impact on innovation

We also believe in the power of motivation and recognition and have these features "baked in" on our ideation platform and methodology. It's great to see ideation in action!!

Prize Competitions vs. Ideation Events

Great post on the Hypios blog where they reference a Ted Talk by Dan Pink. The talk focuses on motivating creativity (what incentives work and don't work).



Several very interesting conclusions:

* financial incentives are merely one source of motivation and, furthermore, can actually de-motivate the participants in certain circumstances
* not all innovation-driven efforts need to be zero-sum; prize competitions such as the X-Prize or Netflix prize appear on the surface to be zero-sum - there are clear winners and losers; however if you talk to any of the finalists for the Netflix Prize you'll learn that they derived significant benefit from simply participating
* the presence of a leaderboard in the Netflix competition was actually not demotivating - it gave all the participants a clear idea of where they stood in the competition and helped motivate them to do better

It is precisely these motivating factors that will drive the success of the DiscoveryCast Ideation Events. And we've added a few new wrinkles of our own.

We have developed several key features that focus on the participants intrinsic motivations: working on an interesting challenge, establishing your reputation by the quality of ideas you share, and reward (points system) & recognition (participants can level-up to higher rankings based on their ideas). We even hide the participants identities in order to create a level playing field. We also let participants build/comment/question other ideas.  And finally, we provide no financial incentives in our business model.

DiscoveryCast Website launching Nov 3, 2009

November 3, 2009 is the day that www.discoverycast.com will be live for the world to see. Let us know what you think!