Today, our trip to the 3M research and manufacturing facility was truly a mind-opener to all of us, as it broadened our scopes on innovation and deepened our udnerstanding of the company. Before the trip, after my prior research on the company, i realised the company had a broad spectrum of products and services offered, but it was truly till we attended the talk and interected with the staff did we turly understand the magnitude and bredth of operations at 3M.The day started off with a talk about the operations of 3M, and from there i already learnt much about the company, not only in their acheivements as a world class company with great potential and economic strength, but also of 3M's values. I learnt much that 3M was not focused simply on economic prospects, but also placed much emphasis on empowerment of employees and welfare of consumers and the environment. I realised that 3M spent over a billion of its 27 billion dollar income on R&D, and allowed employees to do further research to contribute to the company, by creating a condusive environment for research and discussion, such as the Kaizen room. This really awed me and left a long lasting good impression of 3M in my mind.
Along the way i was also awed by 2 of 3Ms products. Firstly was that of the flexible circuits, which really showed the vast technological innovations pproduced by 3M. The flexible circuit gelled with my knowledge of basic circuitry learnt in school, and gave me a deeper understanding on how circuit boards are made, and such an innovaiton really had much potential, one of which i felt could be that of 3M's concept fo a flexible multimedia pad, which would require a flexible circuit to acheive the flexibility and assessibility.
The next innovation that wowed me was that of 3M's new projection technology, which allowed thinner and more effective projection surfaces for effecient mass viewing of media from an external source. This jolted my knowledge of photonics learnt in secondary school, and also sparked off ideas in which such projection surfaces can be used to better portable devices and even innovations such as improving glasses where people can watch movies, making them lighter and more portable.
