Creative People Must Be Stopped Read Online Free PDF

in advance, turning from retrospective analysis to proactive strategy development, you can dramatically improve your chances of innovation success.

CHAPTER 2
    Why Most of Us Are More Creative Than We Think
    Individual Innovation Constraints
    Figure 2.1
    In 1966, after finishing his PhD in chemistry, young Spence Silver joined the R&D division of a diverse and entrepreneurial products company. Then, in 1968, while working in one of the labs, essentially “fooling around” with some of the company’s established technology, Silver developed what should have been a high-end version of one of its core products. Unfortunately, the product he had invented simply could not compete against the firm’s current product lineup. Still he thought it might be interesting to play with.
    Instead of throwing the experiment away and starting over, Silver insisted on showing the thing to his colleagues. He characterizes the reception as “not stellar.” Still he continued to play with it and show it around.
    Over the next five years, Silver kept working on his pet idea without the faintest idea of what it might actually be useful for. Unwilling to take no for an answer, he continued to hold seminars for people throughout the company, hoping that maybe they would have a better idea for how to use his technology. Unfortunately, they didn’t.
    Some time later, Art Fry, another employee of the firm, realized that he had a problem that Silver’s invention might just be able to solve: organizing the music for his hobby of choir singing. Fry met with Silver, and together they began trying to develop a prototype. Over the next two years, the two of them kept working on their “unauthorized” project, eventually resorting to building a prototype-manufacturing setup in Silver’s basement. Several more years passed by the time a stable manufacturing process was developed. As this was happening, Fry had taken to giving away the invention to a few people inside the company. They started using it and began to tell other colleagues; the users couldn’t get enough! So maybe there was a demand, after all.
    Armed with this evidence about the potential popularity of their idea, Silver and Fry approached the marketing department. There they received “an unenthusiastic reception.” It was only through Fry’s appeals for the intervention of more senior managers that the marketing group begrudgingly agreed to help market the invention.
    In the first market trials, conducted in four major cities, customers failed to see the value of the product and didn’t bite. The marketing department was clear that the project should now be put to rest. Fry rejected these findings, believing that people loved the product once they used it, but that no amount of advertising could convey its true value. He appealed to the chairman and CEO for help. Only after this high level of intervention did the marketing group agree to conduct a final trial, a very expensive “product sampling” strategy in the Boise, Idaho, test market.
    In that test, they found that more than 90 percent of the people who tried the product wanted to buy it, so it was finally given the official go-ahead. In 1980, twelve long years after Sliver’s accidental invention of an “inferior adhesive,” the product they invented for 3M, the Post-it, finally launched.

    There are a number of questions that may come to mind in this story of the travails of a creative individual in a bureaucratic organization. For example, what motivates a person like Silver to keep working on a failed and unauthorized project for over five years? What enabled him to perceive the makings of a successful invention where others saw only a failed experiment? Why do some people continue to push hard and long while others give up at the first sign of rejection or resistance? Was 3M just lucky to find Silver, or did he possess some secret qualities that the