3M is known world over for its innovative products. The reason behind 3M's innovativeness was its amazing culture. Some of the differentiating factors of the culture were.
1.All employees could spare 15% of their time thinking of some new innovations and working on it.
2.The employees can ignore the management if they can improve an existing product. There was an aphorism which was well known at 3M "It's better to seek forgiveness than to ask for permission". Due to this the management was also inspired to have a "get-out-of-way attitude".
3.Although the employees were not given royalties for innovation 3M encouraged innovation through various awards as well as in-house grants.
4.Employees worked in close partnerships with the clients to solve their problems. In fact many employees at 3M spent a lot of time on the clients production facilities to understand the operations and come up with solutions to improve them.
5.And the most important factor was that, failures were often celebrated as there were many things to learn from them.
However, the Medical-Surgical Markets Division was facing a problem in coming up with some new products as the current research methods were not giving the desired results. This is when 3M came up with the Lead User Research method. But before I discuss the method I would like to tell the characteristics of lead user. They are experts in their field, very innovative and hence come up with new innovations before the market uses them in the future.
Lead User Research Method:-
The first stage of this method is to make an in house team of experts , try and find out types of market and new products of interest and the desired level of innovation required. The second stage involved focusing on a specific need related trend which involved making sense of all the informations collected in the first stage. In the third stage preliminary concept generation is done. This is the stage where Lead users are invited to give insights on the focused area of consideration. This stage could generate various concepts which are then taken towards completion by the Lead users in the fourth and the last stage. Lead users also seek to ensure that all possible solutions have been explored.
We were shown a video on how the Lead User method worked for 3M for Medical surgical research department. In order to come up with a product that can be used to reduce infection during surgeries, 3M got in touch with various lead users in fields like Surgery, Veterinary and Make-up. This was done as the 3M team found that skin was the source to most of the infections. For example the team found that 30% of the infections occurred from the patients own skin-a figure that highlighted the need for good surgical drapes. Finally 3M came up with a product after almost 6-8 months of product which reduced infections due to skin. Thus Lead User research method can be an effective instrument for a Discontinuous innovation. However the difficult part of this method is to actually catch hold of such lead users who can bring important insights to the organisation.
