In fact, Fleming’s discovery took place after he left his equipment unwashed and went on holiday for a couple of weeks. When he came back, he found that a strain of the dangerous bacteria “Staphylococcus aureus” which had been growing across a discarded petri dish had been destroyed by an air-borne mould – a type of fungus.
“When I woke up just after dawn on 28 September 1928,” said Alexander Fleming, “I certainly didn’t plan to revolutionise all medicine by discovering the world’s first bacteria killer. But I suppose that was exactly what I did.”
“It was a triumph of accident, a fortunate occurrence which happened while I was working on a purely academic bacteriological problem”, he later, modestly, commented.
In 1956, an engineer named Wilson Greatbatch, working at the University of Buffalo was trying to build a device to accurately record the human heartbeat. But he accidentally installed the wrong type of transistor in his prototype and inadvertently stumbled upon the idea for the pacemaker.
In one NYC factory a terrible disease now called "radium necrosis’ began to affect the women who painted radium onto clock faces. Workers, who were encouraged to lick their paintbrushes to help apply the substance, suffered destructive facial tumours, an affliction which eventually alerted the world to its physical dangers.
Although no one else in the M3 business had any interest in this invention, Silver himself was convinced it had a future. He was using the adhesive to create bookmarks and stickable paper reminder notes. Ten years later he finally managed to persuade his bosses to release these notes as a product in their own right - and the rest is history.
How to encourage happy accidents and avoid unhappy ones:
The question is how can we foster an innovative mindset in our organisations without waiting forever, breaking the bank, risking reputation or sending us down unprofitable rabbit holes?
The challenge for many innovative businesses is building the processes and company cultures that will help them:
- Encourage teams to freely ideate and continually present new ideas
- Support experimentation while learning from mistakes
- Rapidly assess feasibility of competing opportunities
- Choose ideas with the most commercial potential
- Mitigate risks of product failure and/or danger to consumers
- Repeat development success in cycles of continual improvement
In this blog post we discuss how these processes can be managed with the right digital tools.