Before Google and Hewlett-Packard, 3M was offering employees time off to explore their own projects -- netting 3M's most famous products to date.

In 1974, 3M scientist Art Fry came up with a clever invention. He thought if he could apply an adhesive (dreamed up by colleague Spencer Silver several years earlier) to the back of a piece of paper, he could create the perfect bookmark, one that kept place in his church hymnal. He called it the Post-It Note.

What you might not know is that Fry came up with the now iconic product (he talks to the Smithsonian about it here) during his “15 percent time,” a program at 3M that allows employees to use a portion of their paid time to chase rainbows and hatch their own ideas. It might seem like a squishy employee benefit. But the time has actually produced many of the company’s best-selling products and has set a precedent for some of the top technology companies of the day, like Google and Hewlett-Packard.

The 15 percent program seems squishy, is now key to 3M’s business strategy.

Today, 3M is a multinational powerhouse, with more than $20 billion in annual sales across a product line 50,000 deep, from adhesives to optical film. It boasts 22,800 patents, many derived from its 15 percent program. The program has been key to 3M’s business strategy and could be a model for other companies eager to innovate. Says Kurt Beinlich, a technical director for 3M: “It’s really shaped what and who 3M is.”

Founded in 1902 in a little town on the shores of Lake Superior, 3M started out in the mining business as the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company. The company thought it had found corundum, a mineral ideal for making sandpaper. But instead, it was low-grade anorthosite -- of little value. With mining hopes dashed, the founders bought a sandpaper factory and struggled for years over how to run it. New investors had to pour in cash to keep it afloat. Eventually, one of them, Lucius Ordway, moved the company to St. Paul, where 3M hit upon some key inventions, among them: masking tape and cellophane tape.

3M launched the 15 percent program in 1948. If it seems radical now, think of how it played as post-war America was suiting up and going to the office, with rigid hierarchies and increasingly defined work and home roles. But it was also a logical next step. All those early years in the red taught 3M a key lesson: Innovate or die, an ethos the company has carried dutifully into the 21st century.

15 percent time is extended to everyone. Who knows who'll create the next Post-It Note?

“It’s one of the things that sets 3M apart as an innovative company, by sticking to that culture of giving every one of our employees the ability to follow their instincts to take advantage of opportunities for the company,” says Beinlich, who tries to get most of his 70-person technical lab team to participate.

How is the program implemented? In Beinlich’s telling, workers often use 15 percent time to pursue something they discovered through the usual course of work but didn’t have time to follow up on. And even that depends on other factors -- how closely managers keep tabs on projects, for one. What’s more, 15 percent time is extended to everyone, not just the scientists (you can hear the cheers in marketing), the idea being: Who knows where the next Post-It Note will come from?

There is failure. As a company culture, it’s accepted, if not entirely embraced. In Beinlich’s department, engineers designed a heat-repelling cover to protect car finishes from welding sparks. But there just wasn’t a market for it: Automotive workers didn’t want to shell out for another product when they could keep layering blankets to protect finishes like they always had. “When we found that out, we celebrated that we had found something that was innovative and had its place. But we said OK; let’s move on,’” Beinlich says.

The 15 percent program has clearly inspired copycats. Google’s 20 percent time famously gave birth to Gmail, Google Earth, and Gmail Labs. (Google would neither confirm nor deny that the idea for its program came from 3M, but it’s hard to imagine otherwise; after all, 3M’s program had been around 50 years before Google even filed incorporation papers.) Likewise, Hewlett-Packard Labs offers personal creative time.

Still, it’s a rare perk at most companies, technical or not. For starters, it’s expensive. 3M invests more than $1 billion in R&D alone; 15 percent of that starts to be a sizable outlay. Author Scott Berkun writes about business innovation. He says these policies only work when the outcomes are backed. “Many companies have tried to emulate the ‘20 percent time idea’ but failed because they remained conservative about supporting the new ideas,” he says. And experts agree that this kind of nudging probably works best at companies where there’s a high level of creative competitiveness; that is, where impressing peers is just as important as the innovation itself.

Some have tried to emulate 3M's program but failed because they wouldn't support the new ideas.

3M’s got that in spades. Once a year, about 200 employees from dozens of divisions make cardboard posters describing their 15 percent time project as if they were presenting volcano models at a middle school science fair. They stand up their poster, then hang out next to it, awaiting feedback, suggestions, and potential co-collaborators. Wayne Maurer is an R&D manager in 3M’s abrasives division and calls it a chance for people to unhinge their “inner geek.” He elaborates: “For technical people, it’s the most passionate and engaged event we have at 3M.”

Past projects have included making clear bandages, optical films that reflect light (seen above), and designing a way to make painter’s tape stick to wall edges (to protect against paint bleed). All these products are on the market now.

Sometimes ideas can languish for years. One worker had a hunch that if he reshaped particles on sandpaper, they wouldn’t dull so quickly. But that was 15 years ago, and the technology and feedback weren’t there to advance it beyond an interesting idea. Two years ago, the same worker started looking at the problem again during his 15 percent time. He made a poster. This time, he got different feedback with the help of new employees and new technology. They discovered they could retain a particle’s sharp, pyramid-like shape just by changing the mixing order (see image up top). Now 3M has a winner in the Cubitron II (above), a sandpaper that acts more like a cutting tool -– and one that still stumps copycats, despite that it’s been on the market since 2009. If not for the 15 percent time, this worker’s idea might’ve never taken off.

Another obvious benefit of this “think time” is in recruiting. Specialized workers are highly prized and fought for. Companies that offer roughly the same salary as another, can tip the scales with paid personal time. (The snow in Minnesota might be another issue.)

“What you’re offering is essentially freedom, and that is very attractive for the right person,” says Henry Chesbrough, a professor at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, and the father of open innovation business practices.

Paid personal time is, of course, just one way to help a company innovate and, given the expense, it’s not best for everyone. Chesbrough says advances in technology can be achieved if companies generally soften boundaries between where ideas come from and how they take root. A company can limit risk by letting internal ideas spin off into external companies, which might be bought back. On the flip side, internal groups can pursue external ideas. Perhaps the real lesson is that the best ideas can come from anywhere. And an innovative company will find a way to champion them.

Kaomi Goetz

Kaomi Goetz is a writer for Co Design. She also uses audio to tell stories about technology and social and economic trends for National Public Radio and others. ... Read more

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The romance between Shirley Knappe, 83, and Frank Sterling Long, 88, began electronically, with poetic early-morning e-mail messages from Long to Knappe, who live in an assisted-living facility in Coral Springs, Florida But now that they have been married for three years, their day-to-day affairs are tracked on Post-it notes, which Knappe corrals onto the kitchen cabinets above the toaster oven: her activities in yellow, his in blue.

"I thought I was going to be knitting and reading when I came here seven years ago," Knappe said. "But when Frank came along after my husband died, we decided to join forces. It was a real love story. We have so much fun together. I developed the system to keep all our activities straight."

Knappe was speaking last Thursday as she and her husband were on their way to a wine tasting, which was marked on a blue Post-it (group activities are in blue, Long's color, because "my memory is better than his," she said). Their ID numbers for the Wheel Watchers Club, the "Wheel of Fortune" show's lottery, are on Post-its, along with "everyone's cellphone numbers and my odds and ends, like the name of Frank's daughter's cat, Millard," said Knappe, who had paused to consult the note in question. The couple is working on a mystery novel set in an assisted-living facility. Post-it notes may be a plot device, Knappe suggested.

In 1980, when the 3M company introduced the Post-it, no one could have foreseen the effect the 3-by-5-inch Valium-colored rectangle would have on domestic life. Its beginnings were folkloric: 40 years ago, Spencer Silver, a scientist at 3M, discovered the imperfect adhesive that would adorn the Post-it; it took another six years for Art Fry, another 3M scientist, to find the application for this half glue, which came in a flash of inspiration after the bookmarks for his church hymnal kept falling out.

And for years Post-its were marketed primarily for this purpose — as tools for capturing a thought or for marking a spot on a document, among other typically office-bound tasks — even as they were steadily migrating out of the office and into people's homes (and garages), onto vertical surfaces like cabinets, refrigerators, dashboards, mirrors, walls, toilet seat lids, bathroom scales and the edges of pet food bowls.

The notes' migratory tendencies are why 3M scientists developed Post-it Super Sticky notes in 2003, with a stronger glue that hangs on tighter to those nubby, homey, largely vertical surfaces. (Artists and pranksters have used the colored ones like mosaic tiles — an online search for Post-it Elvis will provide one impish example — as have decorators like Jonathan Fong, who made a randomly patterned Post-it wall for a family room in California and photographed the result for his book "Walls That Wow: Creative Wall Treatments Without Fancy-Schmancy Painting.")

Post-its crept into the Museum of Modern Art in 2004, beckoned there by Paola Antonelli, curator of architecture and design, who named the Post-it one of her Humble Masterpieces in a show and, later, in a book of the same name, inducting them, along with the white T-shirt and the rubber band, into the design hall of fame. "Hypertext on a refrigerator door," Antonelli wrote, "the Post-it shook the world."

The 3M company would not say what percentage of its annual profits came from Post-it notes or what kind of growth the brand has enjoyed. But according to the NPD Group, a research firm that tracks retail trends, the category known as self-stick notes, which is dominated by Post-it notes, accounted for $106 million in sales at office superstores like Staples between June 2006 and May 2007, a 13.5 percent increase from the year before.

And next month the company will sail further into the not yet fully charted, topographically fraught home environment with its first official "home collection," the Samba line of hot Latin colors and patterns, the better to accessorize the conversation you may be having, via Post-it notes, with your memory, your loved ones or your inner vixen. (Post-its are big with life coaches as a vehicle for affirmations.)

No mere half-sticky slip of paper, the Post-it is a cache for information that will not stick elsewhere — like in your brain. "Outsourced neurons," offered Dan Heath, a business consultant and teacher and a co-author of "Made to Stick," a new book about business concepts and slogans with staying power. "Or let's call them prosthetic memory."

Memory experts, in fact, call them retrieval cues, an assist for absent-mindedness.

Daniel Schacter, chairman of the psychology department at Harvard and the author of "The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers," describes absent-mindedness as an encoding failure caused by distractedness, divided attention or the fact that your mind is filled with bulky and outdated information like the lyrics to "Muskrat Love." The Post-it, Schacter said the other day, works as a "prospective memory cue or an external memory aid" that can compensate for that failure.

Even memory virtuosos rely on sticky notes, said Schacter, who in his book quotes a national memory champion, Tatiana Cooley, as saying: "I'm incredibly absent-minded. I live by Post-its."

But sticky notes have not caught on in the home merely because of fading memories. They also serve as a voice-saving substitute for orally delivered parental directives. Since the leaver of the message does not have to be present when the message is read, the notes are handy deflectors of the tedious, whining responses of progeny ("Mom, stop nagging me!").

Whether you view these domestic telegrams as signs of dysfunction, the decline of face-to-face communication or merely as nifty argument-savers, there is the plain fact that members of many contemporary families are seldom in the same place at the same time.

Tina Miller, 39, is a photographer and the divorced mother of two teenagers, David and Katarina, in Merrill, Wisconsin She has found that nothing gets an urgent point across better than a well-placed Post-it. The front door of the Miller house is the most common canvas, but other surfaces can be called into service. "My daughter went through a couch potato phase," Miller said Saturday, "so for a while the TV was a good place to say things like, 'Load the dishwasher before you turn me on!' "

Katarina took up the story. "Sometimes I use them for getting money out of her," she said. "I'll be like, 'Mom, can I please have some moolah for a movie?' and I'll stick it on the toilet seat so I'll know she'll get it. Sometimes my brother writes over my note, 'Wake me up at 6:30' type of thing, and that really ticks me off."

Being able to communicate at the site of the action is the sticky note's particular talent, as Schacter pointed out. "That's why less portable memory aids like PDA's or diaries don't work so well," he said. According to Darrell Coutu, the Post-it brand manager, 3M ethnographers have noted folks layering their electronic organizers with Post-its. "Paper is not dead," he said.

In St. Louis, shocking pink is "the color that moves best around our house," said Inda Schaenen, 46, who teaches, writes novels for young adults and describes herself as "your basic suburban mother of three." Schaenen described the Post-it as "this perfectly designed artifact, low-tech and easily placed in areas that are kind of obscure and remote."

"Minky ate," is what Schaenen stuck on the dog's bowl the other day. "Claim your cleats," is a recent communiqué that found its way next to one on an orphan shoe in a mudroom: "Where's my mate?"

The search for another sort of mate is what propels the lovelorn to Rhonda Britten and her Fearless Living Institute, a life-coaching brand and umbrella for a blog, books, television programs and coaching services. The application of Britten's manifesto, "Live the life your soul intended," hinges on the Post-it, upon which Britten directs her clients to write their intentions, which, she said firmly, are different from affirmations.

"Affirmations are like, cut to the chase, get to the result, so in an affirmation you'd write: 'I am now in a beautiful relationship.' But I want people to take action, rather than being so passive in their lives, so an intention might say instead, 'I am willing to be loving in all my relationships.' I ask my clients to stick them in unexpected places, like inside the medicine chest, so they become inspirations rather than 'uh-oh, there's that note again.' "

Britten, who charges $400 for a 50-minute coaching session, which she conducts by telephone, said Post-its were critical to her method. "They build awareness," she said, "and building awareness is the key to change."

She keeps Post-its in her wallet, for signing autographs and writing down book ideas. She said she had 25 or so Post-it notes stuck around her house in Eagle-Vail, Colorado They are tucked into books, her underwear drawer and her junk drawer, she said, ticking off a few prime sites, but there are just three intentions written on them.

"I never have more than three intentions going at one time," she said. "Otherwise it confuses the energy."

Rebecca Murtaugh, an artist, was thinking about space, value and the "thingness" of objects, as she put it, when she created her 2001 Post-its installation in her bedroom in Arcata, California, where she was living at the time.

"I was really mesmerized by Post-its," she said last week. "They come in all these colors. They are beautiful. They have a purpose, but it's different for everyone: sometimes it's a note, 'I'll be back,' or maybe it's a phone number. But for all these important things, the note itself is always ephemeral and temporary. Yet it's carrying all this valuable information. So there is this duality: it's disposable, but it's very valuable. I wanted to mark an important space, not a book with a note, but an entire room."

It took Murtaugh six days to cover her bedroom and all the objects in it with Post-it notes. She used the original yellow for areas that she said had less value, like the walls, and neon colors for areas of more value, like the bed coverings and the rugs. She spent over $1,000 at her local stationers, and titled the piece, "To Mark a Significant Space in the Bedroom #1." Only five people saw the original, including her now-husband, who had gone away on vacation and returned to find the work in place. ( Murtaugh dismantled it after 24 hours, but the piece lives on in digital form on design blogs like insurgentmuse.com and the artist's Web site, rebeccamurtaugh.com.).

"He was kind of alarmed," she said. "It sort of felt like you were on the inside of a piñata."

Her relationship to the more mundane applications of Post-its has been irrevocably altered. "What's interesting is that I don't use them for organizing anymore," said Murtaugh, who teaches art at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York "I don't want to waste them."