Many classic, successful products have been invented “by accident” – by an unintended mishap that just happened to turn out to be a brilliant stroke of R&D genius: Penicillin, the microwave, chocolate chip cookies and more.And the stories behind these incidents are always so fun and surprising that they catch our attention and stick in our minds for good.
Here are just a few of the classics. You have no doubt heard them, or similar versions of them, numerous times.
Ivory Soap
In 1878, in a Procter & Gamble soap production factory, one of the employee’s lunch breaks took longer than expected. The whole thing would have gone unnoticed, if not for a malfunction that got out of hand. Continue reading ‘Lucky Engineering Accidents’
It makes sense that accidents often lead to good ideas, such as Post-it notes, Viagra and chocolate chip cookies. During ‘normal’ thought processes in search for ideas, we are locked in fixedness, beliefs, habits and criticism. Accidents easily bypass these obstacles. They just happen.
The first challenge, therefore, is intentionally causing accidents; and the second, no less complicated, is identifying them as opportunities for innovation and not as failures. We’ll start with the second challenge.
Let’s take, for example, business cards. Those usually white rectangles, usually 2X3.5 in., with the name of the card’s holder, his/her position and contact information. The font is ordinary, the color scheme – common – and the practice is gray and predictable.
At conferences or meetings with multiple participants, I often receive a bunch of such cards and by the next day (or even an hour later) I cannot remember who gave them to me. All the cards look the same.
