Foster organic growth by expanding its customer base, inventing entirely new and market-changing products in, electronic, transportation, industrial, safety, security and display using shared and / or leveraged technology. It is contrary to belief that merger and acqusition is good for 3M. 

Innovation from everyone and everywhere; constantly recruiting new employees from a diverse background and allow their employee to hold dual citizenship (besides their functional role, they are a part of the technical / business / research community). Employee are usually matched across by their leaders to work on a similar idea as well. 

An open innovation process; it is a well-known approach yet unique and hard to duplicate. It creates an enterprising environment where different people from different division interact or collaborate to create new ideas.Senior leaders take real effort to sustain and nurture the culture (by holding ideation session and break employee out of their comfort zone). This approach however is an open concept that can be adopted easily by other organisation. 

Emphasized the importance of research and development (R&D) to which the company dedicates six percent of its yearly revenue (although a high percentage in R&D spending does not guarantee success). This spending is deemed as an investment and cost to conduct studies, models, simulations or prototyping as part of an innovation process.

 

Long-term approach to the new product development process by creating a culture of innovation that encourages risk-taking, tolerates mistakes made along the way, and rewards achievement. This approach also highlights the understanding of time and effort needed in innovation as well as continuous learning to reduce risk or uncertainties.