Happy Accidents Every industry has a founding myth about luck. Somebody spills something, somebody leaves something on a windowsill, and a fortune follows. It is a lovely story, partly because it is democratic. If invention is a lightning strike, it could strike any of us, ideally while we are doing something else. Go and look at the famous accidents up close, though, and the accident turns out to be the cheapest part. Something else does the actual work, and that something else can be learned. Here are three examples I found facinating so thought I’d share them with you. The cookie that invented the chip In 1938, Ruth Wakefield chopped a bar of Nestlé semi-sweet chocolate into a batch of biscuit dough at the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts, and the chocolate chip cookie came into the world. The inn really had been a toll house, where travellers once paid to use the turnpike and, one assumes, complained about the prices. The cookies became locally famous, people started making them at home, and to do that you had to buy a Nestlé bar and chop it up yourself. So sales of one particular chocolate bar started behaving very strangely in one particular corner of Massachusetts. Nestlé noticed. Its chief executive went to find out why, discovered a biscuit, and in March 1939 struck a deal: Nestlé would print Wakefield’s recipe on the wrapper and use the Toll House name, and she would receive chocolate for the rest of her life. Which sounds like a poor deal until you learn she asked for it. Nestlé, still thinking of itself as a company that sold bars, then began scoring the chocolate into 160 small pieces and putting a little chopper in the box, so you could hack it up more conveniently. Only after all that did somebody at Nestlé think to sell the chocolate ready-chopped. An entire product category exists because a customer had already invented a use for something they were selling, and it took them the better part of a year to catch up with her. The one that really did melt In 1945, Percy Spencer was standing near a magnetron at Raytheon when the snack in his pocket went soft. He fetched popcorn kernels and held them near the tube, and they popped. He then tried an egg, which exploded over a colleague, establishing a fine tradition of scientific progress being paid for by whoever is standing nearest. Within months, he had filed a patent. By 1947 Raytheon was selling the Radarange, the world’s first microwave oven: nearly six feet tall, around 750lb, water-cooled and priced like a small car. Your countertop version is a direct descendant, sulking quietly while it reheats your porridge. Spencer was not the first to notice. Magnetrons had been gently warming things in front of engineers throughout the war, and those engineers had responded by moving their lunch. Spencer had left school at twelve, worked in a spool mill and then a paper mill, and taught himself physics on night shifts from borrowed textbooks. He had already worked out that you could stamp and solder magnetron parts rather than machine them, taking Raytheon’s output from 17 a day to 2,600 and supplying most of the magnetrons in Allied radar. He knew that machine intimately. So when it melted his snack, he did not think about his trousers. He thought about what else you could put in front of one. “In the fields of observation, chance favours only the prepared mind.” Louis Pasteur, lecture at the University of Lille, 7 December 1854 The wallpaper nobody wanted In 1957, Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes sealed two plastic shower curtains together, trapping a neat grid of air bubbles between them, and took the result to interior designers as daring modern wallpaper. Nobody bit. Undeterred, they tried it as greenhouse insulation. Nobody bit there either. Then in 1959 IBM had a problem. It was launching the 1401 computer and needed to send delicate machines across America without them arriving as a bag of parts. Same material, third customer, and the thing became Bubble Wrap. The company they founded to make it, Sealed Air, is now worth billions, and their invention has acquired the rare distinction of being genuinely beloved. There is an appreciation day for it. Nobody has ever held an appreciation day for wallpaper. The invention never changed. Not once. What changed was who they showed it to. This week’s one key takeaway Put the three side by side and the same move appears in each. Chocolate that stays in stubborn lumps is a defective chocolate, unless the job is a biscuit. A machine that warms your lunch is an occupational nuisance, unless the job is supper. Plastic too lumpy for a wall is exactly right wrapped around a mainframe. Nobody fixed anything. They found the job the thing was already perfect for. Before you fix the flaw, find out who it’s perfect for. How to use it this week Watch what people actually do with your product. Nestlé did not set out to invent the chocolate chip. It spotted odd sales figures in one town, went to look, found a cookie, and invented the chip to serve it. Your version of that signal is in your data right now, doing something unexplained. Change the customer, not the product. Bubble Wrap failed twice and was never once altered. Before you rebuild the thing, go and find someone else to show it to. List the complaints, then invert them. Too slow, too small, too odd, too expensive. For each one, name a customer who would call it the reason they bought. Get closer to your own machinery. Spencer’s advantage was not the melted snack, it was understanding the magnetron better than anyone in the building. Depth is what turns a coincidence into a discovery. Want to go deeper Spotting the thing everyone else walked past is the whole of our Innovation course, and getting it out of the building is our Intrapreneurship one. It’s our tenth birthday, so use code 4224 at checkout for a little something off. p.s. If you’re reading this and today is the fourth of August, it is National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day. Ruth Wakefield’s recipe survived all of it more or less unchanged, and Nestlé still publishes it. It would be rude not to :)