{Radio} 5 Accidental inventions we can’t live without
Sometimes the greatest inventions come from our biggest mistakes.
Imagine being asked to invent a glue to help airplanes stick together and instead you came up with a glue that doesn’t stick anything together permanently!
Oops, 3M’s Dr Spencer Silver’s bad, or you could take another look at it, as he did, paste it on the back of a sheet of paper and call it Post it Notes and revolutionise the world.
Or what about inventing a new cooking device, because the chocolate bar in your shirt pocket melted every time you worked on your experimental high powered vacuum tube magnetron, aka microwaves. Dr Percy LeBaron Spencer made that mistake and invention.
Professor Wilson Greatbatch
What about Professor Wilson Greatbatch who was asked by the University of Buffalo to engineer a device that could listen to the heart and on one of his attempts put the wrong transistor tube into the device and instead of listening to the heart, it gave off electrical pulses mimicking the heart – that was eventually called the pacemaker.
Chocolate Chip Cookies must have been around for ever, but they weren’t. In 1930 Ruth Wakefield co owner of Toll House Inn was trying to cook up a batch of her customer famous chocolate cookies, ran out of her usual bakers chocolate, looked around found a block of Nestle semi sweet chocolate, cut it up and threw it in instead, sure it would melt in the oven. But of course it didn’t, it stayed whole. She was distraught, her customers wanted more and the Chocolate Chip Cookie was invented.
The lesson from all of this, is that mistakes are not always bad. Look for lessons, meaning and purpose in them. Don’t be so quick to dismiss them. They may not be fit for original purpose, but maybe they’re fit for another purpose.
Listen to this weeks Triple M segment with Anthony Tilli as we chat about these and other accidental inventions (5 minutes 59 seconds)
and this weeks Hong Kong Radio 3’s segment with Phil Whelan as we explore more accidental inventions (18 minutes 43 seconds)
Sometimes the greatest inventions come from our biggest mistakes. Imagine being asked to invent a glue to help airplanes stick together and instead you came up with a glue that doesn’t stick anything together permanently! Oops, 3M’s Dr Spencer Silver’s bad, or you could take anot.
When signals like 5 Accidental inventions we can’t live without emerge, organisations that engage early have the advantage of choosing their response rather than reacting to events. That gap between those who prepared and those who did not is where competitive positioning is actually made or lost.
The most important question is not whether 5 Accidental inventions we can’t live without will matter, but how quickly it will matter in your specific context. Leaders benefit most from mapping the ripple effects early — not just the direct impact but the second and third-order consequences that arrive later and hit harder. That is the practical work of foresight.
