Seeing Opportunity Requires Reframing the System

Around 1970, 3M chemist Spencer Silver was trying to develop a stronger adhesive. What he produced instead behaved almost oppositely: it stuck to surfaces but could be removed easily rather than forming the strong permanent bond he had been pursuing. Against the original objective, the result did not look especially useful, but Silver kept trying to find a use for the unusual material.

Several years later, another 3M employee, Art Fry, encountered a different problem while singing in his church choir. The slips of paper he used to mark pages in his hymnal kept falling out. Fry realized that Silver’s adhesive might hold a bookmark in place while still allowing it to be removed without damaging the page. When Fry shared prototypes with colleagues, they began using them as notes rather than simply bookmarks. The team eventually recognized that the idea was larger than a bookmark: it was a new way to attach information temporarily where it was needed.

The adhesive had not acquired a new chemical property when the opportunity became visible. What changed was the relationship between that property and the problem being considered. Manufacturing, quality, packaging, and sales still had to be solved before Post-it Notes became commercially viable, but those execution problems could only be addressed after someone represented the underlying capability differently.

Failure Against One Objective Does Not Mean Absence of Value

Pharmaceutical development provides an unusually clear version of the same reasoning problem. Scientists funded by the U.S. National Cancer Institute first developed azidothymidine, or AZT, in 1964 as a potential cancer therapy. It proved ineffective for that purpose and was shelved. In the 1980s, as researchers searched existing compounds for activity against HIV, AZT was tested in a different biological context. It suppressed HIV replication in laboratory work and, after clinical development, became the first drug approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for treating AIDS in 1987.

Its earlier failure had established something important but narrower than ‘this compound has no value.’ It had failed against the objective for which it was originally evaluated. Once the relevant problem changed, properties that had not created a useful cancer therapy could matter for a different disease mechanism. Drug repurposing now treats that broader possibility deliberately by investigating existing compounds for indications other than those for which they were first developed.

The same reasoning applies outside medicine. When a product, technology, or research effort fails against its original objective, the organization still needs to understand what was learned. Which properties were actually demonstrated? Which relationships were discovered? Which constraints proved real? A failed objective can close one path without proving that every other path is empty.

An Internal Capability Can Become an External Product

Amazon Web Services illustrates a different transformation. In the early years of Amazon.com, the company had to build and operate increasingly sophisticated computing infrastructure to support its own rapidly growing business. Amazon describes provisioning and managing that infrastructure as difficult and expensive work that diverted talented teams from building other products and services.

One response would have been to continue treating infrastructure solely as an internal operating problem and make Amazon’s own systems progressively better. Instead, the capability itself became representable as something others could consume. Amazon launched Simple Storage Service, or S3, in 2006, followed several months later by Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2, giving customers access to storage and computing capacity without requiring them to reproduce the same underlying infrastructure themselves.

That reframing changed the unit of value. Infrastructure that had primarily existed as an internal requirement of operating a large technology company could also become an external service. The lesson is not that every sophisticated internal capability should become a business. Most should not. It is that the current organizational use of a capability does not necessarily exhaust what that capability could enable elsewhere.

Customers Can Reveal a Different Function

Organizations often search for opportunity from the producer’s point of view: what did we design this product to do, which features should we add, and which adjacent markets might buy it? Customer behavior can expose something different because users do not necessarily share the assumptions embedded in the original product definition.

Kleenex was introduced in 1924 with an advertised purpose centered on removing cold cream. Consumers began using the tissue in other ways, especially as a disposable handkerchief, and they told Kimberly-Clark about it. By 1930, the company’s advertising had changed to reflect the way people were actually using the product. The opportunity did not depend on inventing a new material; it depended on recognizing that customers had already assigned the existing material a different primary function.

Play-Doh underwent an even larger shift. The material that eventually became a children’s modeling compound began as a wallpaper cleaner used to remove soot. As cleaner heating technologies reduced demand for that use, a nursery-school teacher tried the material with children and found that it worked well for modeling. The manufacturer ultimately built a new product business around a function discovered outside the product’s original market.

Research on user innovation gives this pattern a broader foundation. Eric von Hippel and others have documented how users frequently modify products, create workarounds, or develop new applications because they experience needs directly. Producers can sometimes learn from those behaviors rather than assuming that the most valuable product interpretation will originate inside the firm. Unexpected use is therefore not merely misuse to be corrected; in some cases, it is evidence that the market has discovered a capability the organization has not yet represented clearly.

Opportunity Often Appears in Relationships

Across these cases, the opportunity did not sit entirely inside one object. Post-it Notes emerged from the relationship between an unusual adhesive and a need for temporary attachment and communication. AZT became useful when an existing compound was evaluated against a different disease mechanism. AWS emerged when internal infrastructure capability was related to other organizations’ need for computing without the same operating burden. Kleenex and Play-Doh changed when users connected existing products to needs their creators had not originally made central.

This is why opportunity discovery is often a relational problem. An organization can possess the technology, customer knowledge, manufacturing capability, scientific result, market access, or operational expertise required for an opportunity while still failing to see it because those elements remain represented separately. The missing step may not be invention in the narrow sense. It may be a different representation of how existing things could relate.

A useful question is therefore not only ‘What new thing do we need to create?’ It is also ‘What becomes possible if we relate things we already have differently?’ That question can redirect attention from the inherited product category toward the underlying functions, properties, knowledge, and capabilities that category currently contains.

Reframing Creates Possibilities, Not Proof

Reframing is not the same as brainstorming. A brainstorming session can generate many ideas while leaving the assumptions that constrain the organization untouched. A more disciplined form of reframing begins by examining what already exists: what the capability actually does beneath the name given to it, which properties make it useful, which limitations are intrinsic, which belong only to the current implementation, what other problems would value the same functions, and what has changed in technology, economics, regulation, customer behavior, or infrastructure since the capability was first developed.

Customer behavior belongs in that inquiry as well. Instead of asking only what customers say they want from the product the company believes it is selling, the organization can examine what people are already doing differently, which workarounds they have created, and which secondary functions they rely on most heavily. Those signals do not prove a new market exists, but they can expose possibilities the existing product definition would otherwise filter out.

The boundary matters because seeing an opportunity does not make the opportunity viable. Post-it Notes still required substantial manufacturing and commercialization work. AZT required laboratory testing, clinical trials, regulatory approval, dosage refinement, and continuing medical research. AWS required an architecture and operating model capable of delivering infrastructure reliably to outside customers. Play-Doh required a completely different commercial model from wallpaper cleaner. Possibility has to survive feasibility, customer value, economics, risk, capability, timing, competition, and execution before it warrants commitment.

That discipline keeps reframing from becoming enthusiasm. The goal is not to make every inherited boundary negotiable or every unusual use commercially important. It is to prevent the current representation from eliminating alternatives before the organization has had a chance to understand what its capabilities might support.

Look Beneath What Something Is Called

Organizations inevitably create categories because categories make coordinated action possible. Technologies acquire product names. Materials acquire applications. Processes acquire purposes. Capabilities become associated with the markets and problems that originally justified them. Those representations create useful order, but over time they can also become boundaries on what the organization notices.

Post-it Notes became possible when a weak adhesive stopped being evaluated only as a failed strong one. AZT became useful when failure against cancer did not end inquiry into what the compound could do. AWS emerged when internal computing infrastructure became representable as an external service. Kleenex and Play-Doh changed because users demonstrated functions their creators had not originally made central.

The recurring move is to separate what something is from what it has historically been used for, then ask what its underlying properties, functions, relationships, or capabilities might enable under a different problem or environment. Sometimes the existing representation will remain entirely adequate. Sometimes nothing valuable will appear. But occasionally the useful capability has already been created, developed, learned, or observed, and what is missing is a way of seeing it.

Selected sources and further reading

• Smithsonian Lemelson Center, “Art Fry: Post-it Note Inventor” - history of Spencer Silver’s adhesive, Fry’s bookmark insight, and the transition to notes. Source

• NIAID, “Antiretroviral Drug Discovery and Development” - AZT’s 1964 cancer origin, later HIV screening, and 1987 FDA approval. Source

• Amazon Web Services, “Our Origins” - Amazon’s infrastructure problem and the 2006 launch of S3 and EC2. Source

• Kleenex, “Our History” and FAQ - original cold-cream positioning and the later shift toward the disposable-handkerchief use reported by consumers. Source

• Smithsonian Magazine, “The Accidental Invention of Play-Doh” - the shift from wallpaper cleaner to children’s modeling compound. Source

• Eric von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation (MIT Press) and MIT user-innovation research - broader evidence that users often develop or reveal valuable product applications. Source