The cover of Business week on June 11th does not let imagination into play and features very bold: 3M’s Innovation Crisis: How Six Sigma Almost Smothered Its Idea Culture. Another article in their must-have inside innovation dossier heads Six Sigma: So Yesterday? – In an innovation economy, it’s no longer a cure-all.

Those titles set the scene for a story about how the fathers of invention seek a balance between operational efficiency and creativity. James McNerney, a charismatic GE executive took up the CEO role at 3M in December 2000, started rationalising and introduced Six Sigma in every corner of the enterprise, including R&D. 3M’s operating margins went up from 17% in 2001 to 23% in 2005. Nice scorecard for McNermey, who took up the captain’s role at Boeing in 2006.

In the same timeframe at the company that has always prided itself on drawing at least 1/3rd of sales from products released in the last 5 years, that fraction had slipped to only one quarter. James McNerney’s successor, George Buckley, needed to reinstall the proud 3M creative culture, while keeping the advantages of the lean processes. Therefore he releases the Six Sigma pressure on R&D, while at the same time increasing the R&D budget with 20% and focussing 3M’s research on its ’45 core areas’.

Two striking quotes from the article:

• Defenders of Six Sigma at 3M claim that a more systematic new-product introduction process allows innovations to get to market faster. But Art Fry, the Post-it note inventor, disagrees. In fact, he places the blame for 3M’s recent lack of innovative sizzle squarely on Six Sigma’s application in 3M’s research labs. Innovation, he says, is “a numbers game. You have to go through 5,000 to 6,000 raw ideas to find one successful business.” Six Sigma would ask, why not eliminate all that waste and just come up with the right idea the first time? That way of thinking, says Fry, can have serious side effects. “

• George Buckley himself explains: “You cannot create in that atmosphere of confinement or sameness, perhaps one of the mistakes that we made as a company—it’s one of the dangers of Six Sigma—is that when you value sameness more than you value creativity, I think you potentially undermine the heart and soul of a company like 3M.”

source: Business Week