According to their catalogue of accidents, not all false steps and mishaps are equal. In their article Accident, Intention and Expectation in the Innovation Process, they argue that business processes actually prevent helpful mis-steps from occurring. With companies spending hundreds of billions of dollars on research and development, US academics Robert Austin and Lee Devin examined how managers can encourage productive slip-ups.
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Consolidators, with their strong cultures of discipline and cost control, know how to take clever ideas from other firms and turn them into massmarket items. Small and nimble, colonists are adept at creating market niches but are terrible institution builders. Their book, Fast Second, divides businesses into 'colonists’ and 'consolidators’. It is no surprise then that research from the late British economist Paul Geroski and London Business School’s Constantinos Markides found that companies that were skilled at innovation were usually not that skilled when it came to commercialisation, and vice versa.
In these sorts of environments, accidents are called failures and are discouraged.
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Usually they come out of a chaotic, haphazard mess, which is why big companies, full of managers schooled in business programmes designed to eliminate random variation and mistakes, struggle with them. While working for the firm 3M, researcher Art Fry had no idea he was taking the first steps towards Post- It Notes when he used bits of adhesive office paper that could be easily lifted off the page to replace the scrap paper bookmarks that kept falling out of his hymn book.īreakthrough and disruptive innovation are rarely driven by orderly process. The artificial sweetener, saccharin, was the unintentional result of a medical scientist’s work on a chemical treatment for gastric ulcers. The microwave was discovered when Peroy Spender, a scientist with Raytheon, was testing a new vacuum tube and discovered that the sweet in his pocket had melted.
Louis Daguerre, for, instance, discovered the technique that gave US photography in the 1830s, when drops of mercury from a shattered thermometer produced a photographic image. The mistake that gave US cornflakes keeps repeating itself in the history of disruptive innovation, the kind that transforms markets.
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Nobel laureate Sir Alan Hodgkin, who discovered how nerve cells transmit electrical impulses between the skin and the brain, commented: 'I believe that the record of my published papers conveys an impression of directedness and planning which does not at all coincide with the actual sequence of events.’ From this accidental discovery came the cornflakes that generations have now been eating for breakfast.Īccidents happen there is nothing predictable and orderly about innovation. They baked them, and then tried the same thing with corn. Normally, the process produced long sheets, but they were surprised to discover that this time the rollers created flat flakes. It was no good to eat, but they decided to run the stale wheat through rollers, just to see how it would turn out.
When they returned, they saw what they had done.
One day, the brothers left cooked wheat untended for more than 24 hours. Will, were supervising a hospital and health spa in Michigan.