In the 1968, 3M researchers, led by Spencer Silver, were trying to invent the strongest adhesive ever. One of the trials ended up being something rather poor that couldn’t really stick, but it kind of stuck. For five years Mr. Silver promoted his “solution without a problem.” Until one day a colleague, Art Fry, came up with the idea of using the adhesive to anchor bookmarks in his hymn book. Voilà, Post-it was born. And, for the record, the traditional yellow colour was the colour of the paper they had in the lab at the time.
In 1990, Patrick Naughton was ready to quit Sun Microsystems because he was frustrated with the lethargic pace of innovation at the company. Scott McNealy convinced him to write an email about all that was wrong at Sun at the time. That led to a firestorm, and eventually, a group led by James Gosling was hived off and isolated from the “corporate antibodies” in another building in Menlo Park. This group coalesced around creating a universal interface to all things connected, like a universal remote control. Remember, this was 1990 — Minitel in France was the hottest connected thing on the planet!!! In the course of the group’s “hacking” effort, they realised they needed a software platform to manage all of this, which eventually led to the birth of the Java programming language.
In 2009, Stuart Butterfield co-founded a company called Tiny Speck, the MMO game developer that launched the MMO title Glitch. He raised $17.5M on the back of selling Flickr to Yahoo. Glitch was a big failure and closed down in 2012. However, at Tiny Speck they had developed an instant messaging-based team communications tool for their disparate team, which was spread over many locations. They let go of most of the team, re-focused around creating a product out of their internal IM team tool and went off to market it as something called “Slack,” not quite email, not quite messaging. Oh, and by the way, Flickr was born out of Stuart’s first attempt at building a game franchise. Maybe he is now off trying a third time.
What do these innovations have in common? They all came about “by accident”.
Where do your best ideas originate from? How do you turn them into products? How do you facilitate the innovation? What “accidents” or serendipity are you instilling in your work processes?
Our brains are very strange indeed, and in spite of much scientific progress we understand only a tiny fraction of the way our brains function. However, what I do know, is, if you only load more tasks and tighter deadlines onto teams and individuals, they rarely produce breakthrough solutions. They tend to narrow their aperture, limit their scope, they become “automatons,” mindless executors. Maybe allowing yourself and your team time for off-beat, freewheeling activities will stretch and create new thinking. Sometimes just pursue something that you FEEL is important. As most of us have experienced, the good ideas or less obvious connections in our mind occur when we least expect it, like the famous “idea in the shower”. I like road biking as exercise, over time I have learned it is one of the best ways for me to get new ideas or experience new connections of ideas, tasks or problems that I have been wrestling with.
Most of us are extremely busy, and a very “busy” brain is rarely creative. We tend to narrow our horizon under stress and duress. Why not “un-busy” ourselves every now and then ? Maybe some great “accidents” will come to you.
