At Monsanto, it was research director Howard Schneiderman who in the 1970s persuaded two successive chief executives that the company, which was then a fairly conventional chemical firm, should bet big on biotech. Explorers pursue new business models that are initially hazy, but where the potential payoffs are huge. Christopher Columbus setting out to discover what became known as the Americas is an apt analogy.

Senior executives need not invest an inordinate amount of time in the Explorer project. But they have to understand it and back it repeatedly. In budget processes, many elements of the organization will fight to kill investments whose immediate payoff is unclear.

Key levers in making Explorer innovation work include:

• Keeping researchers focused on specific business goals. Other firms invested more money than Monsanto in biotech, but even before they had succeeded, Monsanto's researchers were famed for their clear focus on creating real products.

• Keeping each experiment and probe as inexpensive as possible. Big experiments will only reveal large numbers of difficulties; they're not likely to shorten the time to market to an extent that will justify their cost.

• Resisting the temptation to try to make a big business of the new idea before it is fully understood. Several pharmaceutical companies bought large seed companies in the 1980s thinking they would apply biotech knowledge to them. They found that in the 80s biotech couldn't add value to seed companies, and wound up selling them several years later. By the mid-1990s Monsanto was making the same effort with more success. But Monsanto's serious failures and public relations disasters in application of biotech to the seed business in recent years seems to have resulted from Monsanto, too, trying to push biotechnology in agriculture too fast.

The Explorer style is most powerful when a company has an intuition that's significantly more profound than its competitors' about some long-term challenge. Company leaders sense a big opportunity and also recognize that dozens of complex questions must be answered before profitable products and services can be sold. They must be willing and able to undertake many years of work. They'll require executives to protect the development team from short-term pressures. The Explorer style works best in concentrated industries, where small, nimble competitors can't steal your ideas. If the right conditions apply, the rewards from an effectively managed Explorer process can be incredible.