5.1. Small Practice Groups for a 3M Division

The culture of innovation and collaboration at 3M is well known. Although not referred to as "Communities of Practice" until the late 1990s, such collaborative groups have existed within the company for more than 50 years, starting with the R&D community's Tech Forum. In 1996, 3M's CTO, Bill Coyne, published the six imperatives to activate innovation. One of them is networking. Small practice groups have been introduced at 3M in the past two years and have been welcomed as an approach for improving networking effectiveness.

The small-practice-group approach is one of many used by 3M's Knowledge Management (KM) Program Office, which strives to be a center of expertise for improving 3M's KM effectiveness, ...

Get The Organizational Network Fieldbook: Best Practices, Techniques, and Exercises to Drive Organizational Innovation and Performance now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.