Five Gates to Innovation

strategy + business (holstein) - Corning Inc.’s process for developing inventive products actually works, a claim that few companies can make. Like other top companies, Corning has a rigorous system for managing ideas through a stage-gate process in which they are embryonic in Stage 1 and commercially marketed in Stage 5. But in Corning’s case, the system actually produces consistent results; few organizations could move a product from concept to commercial success in the short time that it took Gorilla to reach customers.

Today, after only a couple of years on the market, Corning’s cell phone glass — now known as Gorilla — is a huge success. Samsung, LG, and Motorola have placed it in three dozen handheld models, and Dell has chosen it for some of its laptops. Gorilla is selling at an annual rate of $100 million and is projected to become a $500 million business by 2015. That will make it a significant revenue stream for Corning, whose sales in 2009 totaled $5.4 billion.

What Corning appears to do better than most is insist that innovation be managed not by individual inventors or small teams in silos, begging for scraps of support from the parent corporation, but by multidisciplinary groups throughout the organization.