3M engineer Art Fry’s invention, the PostIt note, celebrates 25 years of proud existance, changing office life and and sparking the “design by PostIt” unofficial movement. The story of PostIt’s invention is repeated as example for thinking out of the box and business innovation, and Greg Beato writes about it for The Rake
“Post-it Notes, on the other hand, were dynamic, customizable, business casual. They inspired spontaneity, rapid ideation, free association. You could link one seemingly unrelated idea to another without worrying about any logical cohesion of ideas; that’s what the glue was for. After all, the digital drudgery of Office Space and “Dilbert” didn’t tell the full story of office life in the eighties and nineties. It was also the era of Wired and Fast Company, the rebel businessman, thinking outside the box. One day, you might get flynned. On another, you could map out a billion-dollar business plan on half a dozen tiny yellow squares.”