Reflections on Post-it Notes Inventor Talk

Reflections on Post it Notes Inventor Talk

Most product or design people have used or know what a Post It note is. In product teams, they are commonly used to quickly map and iterate on potential user exerpiences, affinity map to synthesize information and much more. I was fortunate enough to be invited to a talk Art Fry, inventor of Post It Notes, gave to a small group of professionals focused on innovation.

Here are a few important themes I took from that talk:

• Importance of the company culture upon innovation
• Characteristics of innovators

Importance of the company culture upon innovation

Art stressed this is a critical component. He started working part-time on Post It Notes starting in 1973-1974. 3M had an ambition to have 15% of revenues come from new product introductions. This policy allowed many employees to spend 15-20% of their time each week on the development new products. He was in the Office products business unit and was exploring opportunities. Art is an avid builder and has invented many products at home to help him in his garden.

He was researching the varioius adhesive products and trying to think of a novel and new use. One day while at church, he was trying to mark the pages of the hymns that were to be sung that day. He found that slips of paper by themselves would fall out of the hymnal. This lead Art to research the many adhesives that 3M’s teams had created. The adhesive needed to be strong enough to stick to paper, but not too strong that it’d destroy the page it was stuck to.

He moved into a lab focused on new products and continued to prototype and iterate. He eventually was working on this full time after roughly 18 months of working on this opportunity. The rest, as they say, is history. With out 3M’s knowledge and extensive R&D into adhesives, it’s doubtful they could have pulled this off. Case in point, many competing firms have tried to introduce a competitor to Post It Notes, but the adhesive wasn’t quite right resulting in the notes falling from the pages or damaging the surface the note was applied to.

3M can no longer create breakthrough products

I asked Art if he thought 3M could still create new breakthrough products like Post It Notes and he emphatically said, without hesitation: ‘no’. I suspected this was the case, but also thought I could be biased. He said that the culture is completely different now. The ambition of 15% of revenues coming from new products is gone. The free time that allows people to work on new ideas is gone. 3M no longer hired people who were inventors or innovators, they now hire operators.

Characteristics of innovators

More than operators or innovators, I asked what are the characteristics of successful innovators. Art indicated that the individual needs to have curiosity. They need to want to understand how things work and why they don’t. They are builders, and not just the individual product, but they also need to understand the ‘business’ side of the product. What does the operations and distribution channels look like to support this product?

While Art didn’t specifically say as much, it seems that persistence would be the sister attribute needed to curiosity. He shared you can’t just give up after the first few attempts. His thought echos Thomas Edison’s infamous assertion that “I have not failed. I’ve just found 1,000 ways that didn’t work.”

Organizations need both Operators and Innovators

An operator can optimize what exists, they’re able to measure and improve throughput or task times. They are important, they are the ones who make the trains run on time. But it’s the innovators who asks the questions about why the train exists in the first place. Organizations need both if they are to thrive or even survive.

‘Curiosity’ doesn’t typically show up on a resume. In an interview process, do we leave out ‘fluffy’ questions?

Do you hire for curiosity? If so, do you also give them space to explore?

What do you think? How have you tackled this?