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Large, successful firms, even with a history of innovation, may create organizational mechanisms that hamper innovation and customer response. This paper will describe how 3M purposefully fights this tendency by attempting to foster innovation within the company through the development of efficient strategies to commercialize technology in rapidly changing environments. The paper will describe 3M’s general policies and its entrepreneurial culture, which are largely well publicized in the popular literature. But the focus will be on on-going strategies to accelerate the commercialization of technology in its electronic business. Specifically, the case of the Electronic Markets Center (EMC), a 3M Electronic and Communications Group unit created in 1997 to leverage the broad range of 3M’s electronic products and technologies will be described and analyzed. Fifteen business units were organized around one single …