In 1968, a young chemist named Spence Silver accidentally created a low-tack reusable adhesive. It was a “problem without a solution”.
Yet it took 12 years of persistence, failure and serendipity for Silver’s invention to become Post-It Notes, now an iconic office supply stable and a $100 million per year product line for 3M. Work and creativity thrive when there is a combination of open and closed space. Steve Jobs designed the Pixar campus to optimize collisions and serendipity. Zappos values collisions over convenience. but how do you engineer serendipity and collisions in a world where the workforce is distributed?