What are radical innovations?

Radical innovation is building a product or service that would have a revolutionary effect on
the market and is often disruptive for the players in that market. A radically innovative
product would have an entirely set on new features (e.g. Post-it) or major improvements on
features of an existing product (e.g. Scotch Brite) or has a significant (30%) reduction in cost
(e.g. Scotch Permanent Glue Stick, 3M Surgical masks). They may have competency
destroying effects on an established organization.

Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing or 3M, as they are known to the world, has been
introducing radically innovative products for more than 100 years now. Their strategy to deal
with radical innovation is based in following:

 Setting stretch targets - such as ‘x% of sales from products introduced during the
past y years’
 Allocating resources as slack - space and time in which staff can explore and play
with ideas, build on chance events or combinations, etc.
 Encouragement of ‘bootlegging’ of employees working on innovation projects in their
own time and often accessing resources in a non-formal way
 Provision of staged resource support for innovators who want to take an idea forward

Over the years, 3M has developed immunity towards external radical innovators by
developing an internal support system for their own innovators. Every employee at 3M is
considered to be a ‘skunkworker’ – allowed to work in their own way- thus giving them no
chance to look outside the window to implement their product.

Take for example the story behind Scotch Tape. The inventor, Richard Drew, came up with
the idea of masking tape from the glued newspaper strips while he was working on creating
a new and crinkly backing material for sandpaper. Though his instructions, at that time, were
to give his entire focus on the sandpaper project but he simultaneously kept working on the
masking tape. Due to him the management adapted “get-out-of-the-way” attitude for the
innovators of the organization. Later he went on to launch the Scotch brand as a subsidiary
of 3M.

Art Fry, the Post it inventor, got the idea of Post it while he was singing in a church choir
where his bookmark kept falling. He the used the 3M’s ‘bootlegging’ policy to solve his
problem and now the world is singing praises of Post it Notes. Now, the Post it brand has
been extended to digital world in form of Post it Digital Notes.

3M has also been innovation over its innovation process. Recently, in their Medical-
Surgical-Division, they launched the ‘Lead User Research’ program as a way to innovate
and develop a new breakthrough surgical drape product. 3M assembled a team of lead
users which included a veterinarian surgeon, a makeup artist, doctors from developing
countries and military medics. The lead users were interviewed so as to gain their insight
into how they solve the problem for themselves. The lead users were then queried to
determine whether they have knowledge of individuals or organizations that were considered
to be “outside the market”. By learning from both the lead users and the outside-the-market
users, companies identified new methods or approaches towards creating innovative
surgical drape products that are true breakthroughs via ideas that may not have surfaced by
simply examining existing users with traditional market research techniques.