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.