To jumpstart product innovation, it is essential to motivate every employee to be innovative, to create or to borrow ideas from anywhere. As Tom Peters said recently: ...get every employee into the act of noticing, learning, adapting, trying out ideas scrounged from (1). Here is how one U.S. company is pursuing this jumpstart. We are enabling our employees anywhere in the world to bring forward unique product concepts and technologies. Our program is called Quest; and Medtronic, Inc. (headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota) has evolved this program over six years with encouraging results. While the program is honed to a particular culture and business, it could be adapted to any company. Innumerable papers, books, and courses have addressed innovation, and a few are referenced here (1-15). Product innovation requires at least two ingredients: the right and the right environment. The right are the skilled, innovative people who must be encouraged and promoted within their organization. They are the creative risk-taking champions who eventually will be followed. The Quest program empowers the right people. The second ingredient, the right environment, is multidimensional. It includes quality interaction with customers, supportive company culture, a sense of urgency, funding flexibility, management endorsement of innovation, individual recognition, and effective employee training. The Quest program encourages the right environment. It establishes an effective innovation process. Why We Started We developed the Quest program in 1987, when Medtronic sales were $525 million and we had about 5,000 employees worldwide. We were in the process of reorganizing the company into six decentralized business units. Our bradycardia pacemaker market provided more than 75 percent of our revenue, but we were intent on diversifying our business. As the company grew, there was a natural tendency toward organizational complexity and process barriers. There were many committees and managers, a situation that tends to suppress innovators. As Medtronic decentralized, we found that each business unit became more focused on its target market and on technologies to support its product line. Research and development personnel often worked closely with customers and could be quite innovative in a narrow product line. Product concepts at the periphery of a business unit's business, or lying between two business units (with regard to technology or customer), received scant attention. An innovator or product champion could be discouraged even though a product concept had potentially significant economic value. We recognized that the periphery of a business was fertile ground for new products and businesses. Business unit general managers receive bonuses strongly dependent on annual financial results. For speculative product concepts requiring three or more years to market entry, the necessary R&D was less likely to be funded because it detracted from short-term financial results. Innovators, who could see over the horizon and needed long-term funding support, occasionally had a difficult time competing against short-term projects. Much of Medtronic's success is derived from close collaboration of company scientists and engineers with medical staff in the clinical setting. We wanted to continue encouraging these collaborations, indeed, to leverage them in a company-wide innovation program. The typical in-house champion was a technical person working closely with customers. As a large company, we sometimes covet the quick decision making to support initiatives that is possible in small companies. Thus, we needed a program that allowed our company to behave as a small company when appropriate. Conversely, our program needed to encourage the leveraging of our large-company, technological strengths. And, lastly, we recognized that certain corporate technical staff members have excellent track records as innovators. …