Innovation Fact 6 – Embrace happy accidents
Breakthroughs are not always the result of genius. Often, they are a result of what we call “happy accidents” — unforeseen events that lead to new insights.
Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin when he accidentally left an uncleaned petri dish in his lab at night and saw that a strange kind of fungus had developed. Percy Spencer got the idea for the microwave oven when he noticed that the chocolate bar in his pocket started to melt while he was studying microwaves for radar technology. Superglue started as a very irritating and sticky by-product of research into the application of transparent plastic firearms sights on WWII weapons.
A lot of organisations still base their innovation on old-school thinking. They ask to get a calculated promise on the money that will be made from investing in innovative products. But in the real world where a disruptive idea can change an industry almost overnight, such thinking is futile.
Fertile soil for innovation
The most innovative companies combine high alignment of purpose with high autonomy for teams in their organizational culture. They also tend to organize common lunches or weekly social activities that bring together people with different backgrounds into random conversations that result in new ideas. Ideas that may be worth working some more investigation.
Learn to fail
Breakthroughs often rely on the open-mindedness of innovators to notice something new, unexpected, and intriguing. Innovation usually happens where teams have the autonomy to try new things. Where daring to fail is seen as a good thing. To capture these ‘mistakes’ it is recommended to have some sort of registering protocol, to catalogue and preserve the remarkable ‘misses’ if they do not get an immediate follow-up.
Search for surprises
At creax, we believe in the power of cross-industry research. After defining the function we want our innovative solution to provide, we start a broad research phase where we’re looking at how similar problems have been solved in other sectors. Can we learn something about vacuum cleaners by studying industrial extraction hoods? Or maybe we can adapt shaving technology and use it in a new lawnmower?
This extensive research brings together a wide range of topics, inspiring us to establish new links between previously separate components. Not happy accidents per se. But a good way to break through the limitations of your current research and spot some surprising correlations.
Be open to what comes your way. We must be willing to stumble onto solutions that we hadn’t intended in our search for innovation.
Get out of your comfort zone. You will fail, but it might be a brilliant mistake.
Innovation Fact 6 – Sidestory: AI can also lead to “happy accidents”
Did you know that artificial intelligence (AI) can also lead to "happy accidents"?
AI proposes answers/concepts based on a request or prompt and a learning database. And AI makes mistakes. While these mistakes can be frustrating and even cause skepticism, they can also inspire us and lead to new and creative ideas.
Using Midjourney’s text-to-image AI platform, several women’s running shoe “designs” were generated from the same request. Some designs show classic features, some are bolder, and some are over-the-top. But some concepts also accidentally show pairs of shoes in different colors, or hybrid sneakers, a combination of a boot and a running shoe. Without the AI-generated models, we probably wouldn’t have come up with these ideas ourselves. By taking advantage of these mistakes, we can potentially create something totally new and innovative! “
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