The Dow Corning Corporation

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Part 3: THE DOW CORNING CORPORATION [13]

Founded in 1943, the Dow Corning Corporation is a jointly owned business in commercial silicone technology by The Dow Chemical Company and Corning, Incorporated. Corning Glassworks had researched the commercial potential of silicone in the 1930's and early 1940's. What Corning needed, however, was an experienced chemical company to assist them in manufacturing this new ingredient, a company like the chemical industry giant, The Dow Chemical Company.

With Dow Chemical's experience and Corning's ideas, silicone would grow to be indispensable, finding applications in the aerospace, electronic, medical products, and construction industries, among others. Dow Corning's first triumph was a sealant used to protect Allied fighter planes' ignitions from failure at high altitudes during the Second World War. When the war was over, Dow Corning explored non-defense applications of silicone, eventually creating more than 5,000 silicone products. Dow Corning continued to emphasize research and expansion throughout the 1950's and 1960's. During this time, the company ordered a substantial amount of testing on silicones' effects, both on organisms and the environment, though not required to do so by any Food & Drug Administration (FDA) regulations. Typically, silicone was found to be chemically inert, failing to cause harmful reactions in rats, monkeys, or even human embryonic cells. With such a characteristic, silicone seemed the perfect candidate for use in medical applications, for instance, in synthetic coverings for burn patients, in a coating on needles to ease insertion, and even in implantable devices like the heart pacemaker.

To further encourage research in this area, Dow Corning opened the Center for Aid to Medical Research (CAMR) as a source of silicone for in-house and independent medical researchers. Thus, in the early 1960,'s Dow Corning supplied Texas plastic surgeons Frank Gerow and Thomas Cronin with silicone for their medical implant device research. Gerow and Cronin, using Dow Corning silicone, invented the first silicone breast implant as a device to aid women who had undergone mastectomies or had congenital breast deformities. Although the FDA had no regulations governing implantable devices, the surgeons conducted two years of clinical trials on the implant prior to Dow Corning's product introduction in 1964. In the next several years, the implant grew popular for cosmetic surgery as well as reconstructive, and Dow Corning cornered both markets.

Not just an innovator in silicone technology, Dow Corning proved itself a leader in organizational management. In 1967, it adopted a matrix management structure, eventually called Dow Corning's "multidimensional management structure."[14] Instead of the traditional divisions only along product lines, they organized themselves into a two-dimensional matrix with profit centers (i.e. business types) as the row headings and cost centers (departments) as the column headings. The resulting rows formed business boards according to product category, such as electronics, with one business manager and a representative from Marketing, Research, Manufacturing, Technical Service & Development, and Finance. (The multitude of countries across which this matrix was implemented was the third dimension, and time was the fourth. Hence it's classification as multi-dimensional.)