Managing Creativity and Innovation

Introduction

Back in the 1920s, a young 3M researcher named Dick Drew visited an auto body repair shop in St. Paul, Minnesota. 3M made and sold sandpaper, and Drew had gone to this shop to test a new batch. As he entered, workers were standing around an automobile cursing a blue streak. The problem was a botched paint job. To deal with the two-tone cars popular at that time, auto body workers had to apply one color at a time, masking the other surfaces with butcher paper, which was held in place with a heavy adhesive tape. In this case—and apparently many others—peeling off the tape also peeled away part of the new paint job, creating a botched job and many hours of rework.

Drew might have said, “That’s too bad” and gone about his business—testing ...