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Key Takeaways Discover why some of the world’s most famous innovations didn’t come from the boardroom.
Learn how everyday employees can spark breakthroughs you might be overlooking.
What do Post-it notes, Gmail and Slack have in common? It’s not just their stickiness. They were all born from employees solving their own problems — innovating at the edge of their organizations with minimal oversight but huge creativity.
In 1974, Art Fry was frustrated when his bookmarks kept falling out of his hymnal during choir practice. He remembered a “failed” adhesive his 3M colleague had created during their “permitted bootlegging” time (now known as 15% time). Fry applied the adhesive to his bookmark, and it never fell out again. That simple idea eventually became the billion-dollar Post-it® note product line.
Fast-forward to 2003: Paul Bucheit, an engineer at Google, was annoyed by storage limits and slow speeds of existing email services. Using Google’s famed “20% time,” he built Gmail, which would go on to become the world’s most widely used email platform.
In 2009, Facebook engineers Justin Rosenstein and Leah Perlman were participating in an internal hackathon. Their challenge was helping users interact with content more easily, a problem they solved elegantly: the “Like” button. Today, it’s a standard feature across social media.
These examples have become part of corporate lore — but they illustrate an important truth: the best innovations rarely come from boardrooms. They come from people on the front lines, solving problems they actually face.
Related: 9 Ways Your Company Can Encourage Innovation
The problem with top-down innovation
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