Whenever a new project is started with a team of three or more people, a Lotus Notes database is set up as a team room and chat space for storing documents, sharing information, etc. These databases may be personal, corporate-specific, or technology-specific, and thousands of these databases currently exist.

3M spends approximately $1.1 billion on R&D annually on about 7,000 people worldwide. Each of these people’s activities are documented in a database. People with access to this database can easily learn what anyone is doing, what the programs are, and what the new ideas are.

Encouraging people to explore different databases outside of the one they “live” in is an issue for 3M. Necessity more often leads people into different databases rather than curiosity. In any case, just making the databases available is key.

3M restricts some proprietary databases to specific users.