The 15% rule

1. vision
2. resources to carry out the spadework
3. commercial acumen

Sometimes all three of these come from the same person - James Dyson is an obvious example - but more often the vision is supplied by an individual and the rest is supplied by two separate groups of people.

I suspect that all the ways of creating products and processes that Lord Broers considers are strong at providing two out of three of the requirements but the big problem is that bringing all three together is hugely difficult.

Creative Commons Image abooth202 via Flickr
A 3M innovation: Post-it notes [Image: abooth202 under CC-BY-ND licence]

One of the organizations that has had a lot of success in combining the three is 3M. With a world-wide network of research laboratories 3M always invested heavily in research but it realised that it needed to develop additional, more novel, mechanisms to try to maximise the creativity of its people.

One of these was “the 15 percent rule”. This gave researchers the chance to spend up to 15 percent of their time developing innovative ideas they believed they could turn into commercial successes.

Project Teams were then set up to take the most promising initiatives forward but rigorous stage-by-stage reviews were then used to weed out the weaker ideas. As these fell by the wayside the strongest grew and developed until they eventually became new divisions of the organization.

Another approach is ‘skunkworks’. This goes back to the Second World War when Lockheed set up a special project to build spy planes.

Some of the company’s best people were brought together in a separate facility with a strong leader (Clarence ‘Kelly’ Johnson) and told to get a new plane into production as quickly as possible even if this meant ignoring bureaucracy and cutting corners.

The approach led to some spectacular successes. For example the U-2 spy plane was built and test flown in eight months rather than the two to three years it would have otherwise taken.

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