3M’s Post-it Note
The failed adhesive that found its calling
Description
In 1968, a research chemist at 3M named Spencer Silver was working at the company’s laboratory in Saint Paul, Minnesota, trying to develop a strong adhesive that the company’s aerospace customers had been asking for. The aerospace business wanted a glue that would hold under high temperatures and pressures. What Silver produced instead, after months of experimentation, was a substance he had not been looking for and that no one had asked for: a microsphere adhesive that was sticky enough to attach to surfaces but weak enough to be removed without damaging them. The substance was, by every metric Silver had been instructed to optimize, a failure. It did not bond strongly. It did not hold under temperature stress. It would not work for the aerospace application that had funded the research. Silver, however, was struck by its specific properties. He patented it in 1972 and spent the following six years giving internal seminars at 3M trying to convince colleagues that there must be a useful application for an adhesive whose central feature was that it did not hold well.
For six years, nobody at 3M could think of an application that justified manufacturing the substance. The microsphere adhesive sat in the company’s patent portfolio as a curiosity. Silver continued to give the seminars. Senior management lost interest. The adhesive looked like one of the thousands of laboratory experiments that 3M’s research operation produced annually, most of which never found commercial use. The story of how the substance eventually became the Post-it Note has been told many times in the management literature, and the central figure in that story is Art Fry, another 3M chemist who attended one of Silver’s seminars in 1974 and who, several months later, sang in his church choir, struggled to keep his place in the hymnal with paper bookmarks that kept falling out, and remembered Silver’s failed adhesive.
The Post-it Note that emerged from Fry’s hymnal problem launched commercially in 1980, twelve years after Silver had first developed the substance. The product became, over the following decades, one of the most successful office-supply innovations in modern American business, with annual sales of hundreds of millions of dollars and a cultural ubiquity that made the Post-it Note one of the few twentieth-century products whose brand name has become the generic term for the category. The case has become one of the standard business-school examples of how corporate innovation can find applications for technologies developed without applications in mind, and how internal corporate culture either enables or blocks the discovery of those applications.
The question we’re asking: what did Silver actually invent, why did it take twelve years to find a use for it, and what does the case reveal about how corporate innovation processes work?
What we’ll see: the failed adhesive, the six years of internal evangelism, the hymnal moment, the launch, and what survives.
Table of contents
01A chemist solves a problem nobody had
3M had been founded in 1902 as the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company. By the 1960s it was one of the largest industrial chemistry companies in the world, with a product portfolio that ran from Scotch Tape to surgical drapes. The research division operated with substantial autonomy. Researchers were allowed to spend up to fifteen percent of their time on projects of their own choosing, a policy that had produced several of the company’s most successful products.
Spencer Silver had joined 3M in 1966 after a PhD in organic chemistry at Colorado. He was assigned to the adhesives research group working on stronger glues for industrial and aerospace applications. The 1968 project that produced the microsphere adhesive was conventional research; Silver was trying to make a better strong adhesive. The microsphere structure tiny spherical particles rather than a continuous film was the unusual feature. The spheres were sticky on their surfaces but did not pack densely enough to produce a strong continuous bond.
02The hymnal and the bookmark
Art Fry was a 3M scientist working in the company’s commercial-tape division. He had attended one of Silver’s seminars in 1974 and had filed the microsphere adhesive in the back of his mind as a curious laboratory result. The hymnal moment came in 1974 or 1975, depending on which version of the story is being told. Fry was singing in the choir at North Presbyterian Church in Saint Paul. He used paper slips as bookmarks to mark the hymns the choir would be singing that Sunday. The slips kept falling out of the hymnal during the service, requiring Fry to flip through the book trying to find his place, often in the middle of singing. The frustration was familiar to him. The solution, when it arrived, was the connection between Silver’s adhesive and the problem he was having.
03The launch failure and the recovery
The 1977 market test was a substantial failure. 3M had selected four cities Tulsa, Denver, Richmond, and Tampa for the test, using conventional marketing materials that described the product’s features but did not adequately demonstrate its use. The advertising explained what the Post-it Note was. It did not explain what it was for. The early adopters who would have been the natural customers had no point of reference for the product. Office-supply buyers were skeptical. Sales were low. The product looked, by the standard 3M evaluation criteria, like another laboratory curiosity that had failed to find a commercial market.
The recovery came from a marketing tactic that the product team developed for the 1978 second test. The decision was made to give away large quantities of Post-it Notes in the Boise, Idaho test market, particularly to office workers in companies that 3M had identified as potential bulk customers. The free samples did the work that the advertising could not. Office workers received pads of Post-it Notes, started using them, found applications the product team had not anticipated, and began ordering more once the free supply ran out. The Boise test produced a substantially higher reorder rate than the 1977 test had over ninety percent of the offices that had received free samples placed paid orders within several months.
04What the case actually shows
The Post-it Note has become one of the standard examples in the management literature of corporate innovation. The version of the story most commonly told emphasizes the role of 3M’s fifteen-percent-time policy, which allowed Silver and Fry to spend time on projects that were not part of their formal job descriptions. The fifteen-percent policy was real and was important, but it was not, by itself, what made the Post-it Note happen. The product required twelve years between invention and launch. The twelve years involved a substantial number of small decisions by individual researchers, managers, and product-development teams, almost any of which could have killed the project at any point.
The actual lesson the case offers is more specific. Corporate innovation processes are good at finding applications for technologies developed with applications in mind. They are substantially worse at finding applications for technologies developed without applications in mind. The microsphere adhesive sat unused for six years because no application had been specified, and the corporate process had no way to evaluate it on its own terms. The Post-it Note happened because two people — Silver and Fry — independently kept the technology visible inside the company until an application became evident. Silver’s internal seminars were the equivalent of low-grade marketing for a product that did not yet exist. Without the seminars, Fry would not have been at the hymnal with the adhesive available in his memory.
05Conclusion
Spencer Silver retired from 3M in 1996. Art Fry retired in 1992 and spent the years afterward giving talks about innovation. The two received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation from President Obama in 2010. Silver died in 2021.
