3M Ubiquity

Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing — 3M — is "about inventing hundreds and hundreds of Next Small Things," reports Marc Gunther in Fortune (9/27/10). "Our business model is literally new-product innovation," says Larry Wendling, head of 3M’s corporate research. No kidding: "The St. Paul company produces a mind-bending 55,000 products." As CEO George Buckley notes, "even in the worst economic times in memory, we released over 1,000 new products."

But you probably will never hear of any of them "because they’re embedded in other products and places: autos, factories, hospitals, homes and offices." These products won’t "generate the buzz of, say, the next iPhone." However, says George, "There’s lots of 3M inside" the iPhone. (He just can’t say exactly what, because he might get a cranky email, or something even worse, from Steve Jobs.)

3M is inventing some pretty cool stuff, though, like Cubitron II, "an industrial abrasive that cuts faster, lasts longer, sharpens itself, and requires less elbow grease." The percentage of 3M’s revenues from new products is back up to 30 percent, having dipped to 21 percent in the first half of the 2000s, when Six Sigma ruled the labs (no more). And most of those are "core technologies — things like abrasives, adhesives, imaging and films," driving growth, "often in unexpected ways." It all adds up to a $23.1 billion business.