Collect and Connect

Learning how innovations are conceived is one of my favorite past-times.

You could say origin stories are my love language. Here’s one of my all-time favorites:

"It begins on a frigid Sunday morning in 1974 in the front pews of a Presbyterian church in north St. Paul, Minnesota. A few weeks earlier, (3M engineer, Arthur) Fry had attended a Tech Forum presentation by Spencer Silver, an engineer working on adhesives. Silver had developed an extremely weak glue, a paste so feeble it could barely hold two pieces of paper together. Like everyone else in the room, Fry had patiently listened to the presentation and then failed to come up with any practical applications for the compound. 'It seemed like a dead-end idea,' Fry says. 'I quickly put it out of my thoughts.' What good, after all is a glue that doesn't stick?

"That Sunday, however, the paste reentered Fry's thoughts, albeit in a rather unlikely context. 'I sang in the church choir,' Fry remembers, 'and I would often put little pieces of paper into the music on Wednesday night to mark where we were singing. Sometimes, before Sunday morning, those little papers would fall out.' This annoyed Fry, because it meant that he would often spend the service frantically thumbing through his hymnal, looking for the right page. But then, during a particularly boring sermon, Fry engaged in a little daydreaming. He began thinking about bookmarks, and how what he needed was a bookmark that would stick to the paper but wouldn't tear it when it was removed. And that's why Fry remembered Spencer Silver and his ineffective glue. He immediately realized that Silver's patented formula — this barely sticky adhesive — could help create the perfect bookmark..."

(From Jonah Lehrer's Imagine, which full disclosure, one must buy used, because it was pulled from circulation after the author was discovered to have misquoted my favorite recording artist, of all people…)

The "perfect bookmark," as I'm sure you've figured out, became the Post-It note.

There are a few reasons I love this story. Obviously, there’s the fact that Fry’s annoyance with his hymnal and his mind wandering during a sermon co-conspired to trigger his subconscious to search for solutions. Then there’s 3M’s organizational mechanism of the “Tech Forum,” which put a spotlight on seemingly worthless discoveries like ineffective glue. And then, of course, the instantaneous connection between two unexpected things.

There’s also lots of experimentation and iteration that led to the ultimate innovation, but those are stories for another post…

For now, it’s an excellent example of collection and connection: innovators are always collecting — problems, ideas, new technologies, etc — and connecting them to forge new possibilities.

Related: Keep A Bug List
Related: Escape the Tyranny of Reason
Related: Make Connections
Related: Reduce Experimental Fidelity
Related: Iterate to Innovate

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