# Keynote Case Study: DuPont — Science-Based Industry Had to Move at Startup Speed
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DuPont had nearly 210 years of history behind it. That was precisely why the future mattered so much. When I addressed senior DuPont leadership, the focus was on a challenge that confronts every large, successful science-based organization: How do you preserve deep institutional capability without allowing history to slow you down? DuPont had extraordinary depth in chemistry, materials science, agriculture and industrial biotechnology. But the competitive environment around those disciplines was changing quickly. Genomics was accelerating. Nanotechnology was opening new frontiers. Advanced materials were creating entirely new product possibilities. Scientific discovery was moving faster. And smaller organizations were increasingly able to experiment, collaborate and move with the speed of startups. That creates a fundamental innovation tension. Large organizations possess scale, knowledge, infrastructure and experience. Startups possess urgency. The strategic challenge is to combine both. My keynote challenged DuPont’s leadership team to think about innovation not as a separate program or isolated R&D activity, but as an organization-wide mandate. The question was not simply: What new products can we invent? It was: How do we build an organization capable of continuously turning scientific change into opportunity? Six themes framed the discussion: Accelerating Science. Breakthroughs in genomics, nanotechnology and materials science were shortening the distance between scientific discovery and commercial application. Advanced Materials. New materials were opening possibilities across manufacturing, agriculture, energy, healthcare and consumer products. Startup-Speed Innovation. Scale could no longer excuse slowness. Large organizations increasingly needed the urgency and decisiveness associated with entrepreneurial firms. Innovation as a Mandate. Innovation had to extend beyond R&D and become a clear organizational expectation. Bold Leadership. Leaders had to create permission to pursue ideas that challenged traditional assumptions. Organizational Alignment. A successful innovation culture required the same message to cascade through leadership, teams, processes and decision-making. One of the ideas I was emphasizing in this period was the need for leaders to establish a simple and powerful innovation mandate. Organizations often make innovation too complicated. They build elaborate processes. They create committees. They develop innovation language that nobody remembers. And then they wonder why nothing changes. The better approach is often to make the mandate unmistakably clear: Be bold. Think differently. Challenge assumptions. Move faster. Experiment. Learn. Do. Those ideas became part of what I called my “10 Great Words” for innovation — a way of turning innovation from an abstract corporate concept into a practical leadership expectation. The larger lesson for DuPont was simple. Scientific heritage is a tremendous asset. But heritage alone does not guarantee relevance. The organizations that thrive through periods of rapid scientific change are those that combine deep capability with speed. They respect what made them successful. But they do not allow that success to become an anchor. The future of science-based industry belongs to organizations that can combine the depth of a 200-year-old institution with the urgency of a startup.

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Source: https://jimcarroll.com/2012/09/keynote-case-study-dupont-science-based-industry-had-to-move-at-startup-speed/