Since reading Gary Hamel’s latest book The Future of Management, I have been intrigued and inspired by the way W.L. Gore has innovation running through its veins, where the key word is collaboration.

In short, if you have an idea at W.L. Gore you are free to pursue it, although with such discipline that results from normal work are not jeopardized. There are no formal processes to guide these innovations. ‘All’ you need to do is to convince your colleagues about the potential value of your idea and get their help.

The mechanism is quite simple. Ideas with high perceived value will get a lot of support and bad ideas will not get support and vanish.

Working in this way W.L. Gore is able to scan great numbers of ideas and many are killed in an early stage and in a natural way.

The result is that W.L Gore is a very healthy company, is viewed as one of the most innovative companies in the world, and has been consistently ranked high in the lists of best places to work.

We use parts of the Gore vision at our clients a lot to improve the way they innovate.

I came across a presentation of W.L. Gore’s CEO, Terri Kelly, for MIT Sloan School of management. They summarized her talk as follows:

“A lot of companies ask about ’How do you innovate ? What do you invest in R&D?’ They’re not really the right questions to ask. We would flip that and talk more around ‘How do we create the right environment where collaboration happens naturally — that people actually want to work together, that they actually like to be part of something greater than just the individual contribution?’ And if you get that part right, all the other pieces fall in place that allow us to creat this great innovation cycle within Gore.”

Here is the entire 55 minute presentation. It is absolutely worthwhile to watch!