Art Fry Product Innovation Award

A NOTE THAT WOULDN'T STAY PUT

Every product community has its version of the same story: a good idea that almost didn't happen, saved by someone who refused to let it die. Few stories tell it better than the invention of the Post-it Note. This year, ProductCamp Twin Cities is proud to introduce an award in the name of the man behind it — Art Fry — to recognize product builders in our own community who show that same combination of curiosity, persistence, and generosity toward the people they build with.

The Art Fry Product Innovation Award will be presented for the first time at ProductCamp Twin Cities 2026, and will be given annually to a member of our community whose work embodies the spirit of Fry's own career: solving a real, unglamorous problem, refusing to give up when the idea was dismissed, and sharing credit generously along the way.

WHENCE ART FRY?

Arthur "Art" Fry was born in Owatonna, Minnesota, in 1931 and spent much of his childhood in small towns in Iowa and Missouri. He was, by every account, a natural tinkerer — as a boy he built himself a homemade toboggan-turned-bobsled rigged for both snow and dry ground, an early sign of the problem-solving instinct that would define his career.

Fry began his education in a one-room schoolhouse before eventually returning to Minnesota, where he earned a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from the University of Minnesota in 1955. He had already taken a summer job at 3M as an undergraduate — a summer job that turned into a career spanning nearly four decades in the company's New Product Development division.

AN IDEA THAT ALMOST DIDN'T SURVIVE

The invention that made Art Fry famous almost never happened, and it took the better part of a decade to get there. In 1968, 3M chemist Spencer Silver was trying to develop a stronger industrial adhesive. Instead, he ended up with the opposite: a strange, low-tack adhesive made of tiny acrylic spheres that stuck to surfaces but pulled away cleanly, again and again, without leaving a residue or tearing paper.

3M didn't know what to do with it. Silver spent years pitching the adhesive internally with no real success — he even tried, and failed, to turn it into a reusable bulletin board, an idea sunk by dust and dirt buildup on the board's surface. Many of his colleagues considered the whole thing a curiosity at best. Silver kept the sample anyway and kept talking about it to anyone who would listen.

1968 — Spencer Silver accidentally invents a "failed" adhesive while trying to create something stronger. It is shelved.

1973–74 — Silver's attempt to commercialize the adhesive as a reusable bulletin board fails. Around the same time, Art Fry attends one of Silver's internal seminars on the adhesive and files it away in his memory.

1974 — Singing in his church choir, Fry grows frustrated when his paper bookmarks keep sliding out of his hymnal. During a slow sermon, it occurs to him that Silver's adhesive could hold a bookmark in place — and lift off again without damaging the page.

1975–76 — Fry builds a rough coating machine in his basement to apply the adhesive to paper, and discovers something bigger than a bookmark when he starts leaving sticky notes for colleagues around the office.

1977 — 3M test-markets the product in four cities under the name "Press 'n Peel." Sales are disappointing, and the product looks like it might fail before it even gets a real name.

1978–80 — Rather than give up, 3M tries something unconventional: giving the product away. In what became known as the "Boise Blitz," the company flooded offices in Boise, Idaho, with free samples. Once people actually tried it, nearly all of them wanted more. The relaunched "Post-it Note" goes national in 1980.

It's worth sitting with how many places this idea could have died — a shelved adhesive, a failed bulletin board, a lukewarm test launch — and didn't, because two people kept believing there was a use worth finding.

THE CREDIT ART FRY KEPT GIVING AWAY

Ask people close to the Post-it Note's history what stood out about Art Fry, and it's rarely just the bookmark idea — it's how consistently he pointed the credit somewhere else. Fry was open, repeatedly and publicly, that none of it works without Silver's adhesive, and that the two men's contributions were inseparable from one another.

"We were the right team to make it happen. It was like we were joined at the hip. Without his microspheres, I couldn't have made Post-it Notes."
— Art Fry, on working with Spencer Silver

That instinct to share the credit wasn't a one-time press quote — it showed up throughout both of their careers. Silver spent five patient years pitching an adhesive nobody wanted before Fry ever entered the picture, and Fry never let that fact disappear from the story, even as he became the more publicly recognized half of the pair. Both men were eventually honored together: elected to 3M's Carlton Society, the company's highest scientific honor, and jointly inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2010 — recognition Fry consistently framed as belonging to both of them.

Even as the Post-it Note became one of the best-selling office products in the country — and Fry himself held dozens of patents — he described the reward of the work simply, in terms of the people who used what he'd made rather than any accolade attached to his own name. It's a small thing, maybe, but it's exactly the kind of small thing this award is meant to notice.

A MINNESOTA HABIT

Art Fry and Spencer Silver's work didn't happen in a vacuum — it happened inside a regional culture that has quietly produced an outsized share of the country's practical inventions. 3M itself started in 1902 as a small mining venture on the shore of Lake Superior before reinventing itself, more than once, into an innovation-driven manufacturer. The Twin Cities and the broader Minnesota region have kept that habit going for well over a century.

• 3M — Scotchgard & masking tape

• Medtronic — first wearable pacemaker

• Cray — supercomputing

• Rollerblade — inline skates

ProductCamp Twin Cities exists because this region keeps producing people who build things worth using. The Art Fry Award is one way of making that lineage explicit — and of asking who in our own community is quietly doing the same kind of work today.

ABOUT THE AWARD

The Art Fry Product Innovation Award will be presented for the first time at ProductCamp Twin Cities 2026, marking the start of what will become an annual tradition. Each year going forward, the award will recognize a product professional in our community whose work reflects the same qualities that defined Fry's career: a willingness to keep pushing on a problem everyone else has given up on, and the humility to share credit with the people who made the solution possible.

SPECIAL THANKS

Thanks to the members of the Art Fry Product Innovation Award research and selection teams.  And special thanks to Kablooe Design for their financial support of the award.