The Story of 3M, a Company of Innovators

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, even before inventing Post-its, was certainly not just any company. 3M had already invented adhesive tape, marketed it as Scotch, and its popularity had skyrocketed to the point that the product's trade name became an enduring synonym for adhesive tape.
A company that had already known how to innovate in its field and that with the post-it product carried out a textbook operation still studied today by all marketers in the world.
In short, everyone believes that post-its are the result of chance, a completely casual vp safety email list invention, but today we will see that this is not the case, because 3M is first and foremost a company of innovators.
Let's start from far away, in fact, and understand the spirit of 3M from its history.
In this article

The invention of the post-it
Three lessons to learn
Conclusion
The Story of 3M, a Company of Innovators
The Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company, or the company that we will hereafter simply call 3M, was founded way back in 1902.
Of the five people involved, not a single one had a similar background to the others. They ranged from a guy who specialized in medicine to a guy who practiced law, passing through a manager of a meat market and two executives in the railway sector.
Okay, the last two may have had similar backgrounds, but the point is that these five people, all born in the late 1800s, decided to launch a start-up with the sole goal of technological innovation.
Sandpaper. 3M wanted to produce innovative sandpaper and purchased mines from which to extract the production materials, in search of a mineral or substance never used in that field and that would transform sandpaper as it was known up to that time.
In a short time a newly hired inventor – one Francis G.Okie – finds a way to make sandpaper waterproof and with little dust emission in use. Eureka!
3M markets it and conquers the market, but wants more and creates (in part) a whole new market: that of bladeless shaving products for men.
That's right, 3M sold sandpaper for shaving for years and this is the same creative and subversive, almost visionary spark that years later led to the birth of the post-it.
The invention of the post-it
Fast forward to today, 3M has already come up with many brilliant ideas and Scotch is definitely the goose that lays the golden eggs, but 3M doesn't like to rest on its laurels and every three years or so it starts doing research and development, hoping to identify new promising adhesive polymers to further improve the adhesive tape.
For this task, in 1964, chemist Spencer Silver was hired who one day, almost by mistake, added more than the recommended dose of the chemical reagent that joins monomers into polymer chains.
Silver would later say: “I just wanted to see what would happen, that’s all!”
What happened was that a glue was created that in the notes of the time he defined as “sticky but not aggressive”. He then noted that, unlike many other adhesive glues, this chemical combination remained on the starting surface, not making sticky what it was made to adhere to.
3M isn't interested in such a weak glue, but 3M was born as a company of innovators and so it set up a work environment that protects the company from foolishly missing out on innovation opportunities.
Silver was fired, rehired, and yet after a series of bizarre vicissitudes he succeeded in his intent and 3M patented the whole thing and found a field of application: slips of paper for notes and memos to stick where needed and detach without damaging the surfaces or leaving them sticky. Eureka pt.2!
It took time to move from the product idea to the finished product, with the iconic idea of ​​stacking the yellow squares, but this was still not enough because 3M's marketing department believed so little in the project that they organized feeble and uninspired campaigns.
We had to wait until 1980, sixteen years after the hiring of chemist Spencer Silver, to see the post-it officially marketed and distributed on a large scale.
What made it work?
What we now know generally works well for new product categories: free samples (if economically feasible as in the case of post-its) or demonstrations of use that involve as many target audiences as possible.