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If the employee fails, that is okay too. Failure, says Pinchot, should be regarded as a learning experience and must be permitted within firms. He writes that large companies are good at coming up with sound ideas, but they are generally poor at carrying them out because of a "morass of analysis, approvals and politics."
General Motors is not the only major corporation to adopt intrapreneurship. Data General, DuPont, Texas Instruments and AT&T are all trying to nurture intrapreneurs. Even smaller companies are trying to catch the spirit. At W.L. Gore & Associates, a privately held firm in Delaware founded by the husband- and-wife team of Wilbert and Genevieve Gore, the employees, or "associates" as they are called, are grouped into teams of no more than 150 to 200 people to encourage new and different ideas and products. One such team developed GORE-TEX, a line of insulating fabrics used in space suits, tents and ski jackets. Gore also makes antipollution filters, desalinization products and artificial veins and arteries.
Some firms trying intrapreneurship:
Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing. Arthur Fry, 53, a 3M chemical engineer, used to get annoyed at how pieces of paper that marked his church hymnal always fell out when he stood up to sing. He knew that Spencer Silver, a * scientist at 3M, had accidentally discovered an adhesive that had very low sticking power. Normally that would be bad, but for Fry it was good. He figured that markers made with the adhesive might stick lightly to something and would come off easily. Since 3M allows employees to spend 15% of their office time on independent projects, he began working on the idea. Fry made samples and then distributed the small yellow pads to company secretaries. They were delighted with the product. 3M eventually began selling it under the name Post-it. Sales last year: more than $100 million.
General Electric. Jacques Robinson, 37, was named in 1982 to run GE's lackluster video-products division in Portsmouth, Va., and set out to extend it to include a long list of products for home information and entertainment. His door, he said, was open to anyone with helpful ideas. One respondent was Howard R. Stevenson Jr., 48, a technical whiz since his high school days in Michigan. He had spent his entire professional life with GE, most of the time working on radar, but felt stifled. General Electric offered him the chance to move to Portsmouth, and he soon saw his first opportunity. Ordinary TV sets are much less effective than monitors in displaying data from home computers, video games and video cameras. Laboring at night in his cluttered home workshop, Stevenson designed circuitry that brought standard television sets up to monitor quality. Last May the new monitor went on sale. Robinson says it has been "very successful," and Stevenson's career has been reborn, along with GE's consumer electronics operation. Says Stevenson: "I like the atmosphere of taking risks, trying things."