Retec Interface Lab

Accidents will happen, and it’s surprising how many commonplace items came about by accident, most often through a process of trial and error or as a result of indulging in playtime.

Play-doh was invented by a couple who were trying to invent wallpaper cleaner. The pace maker, super-glue, ice-cream cones, post-it notes and the slinky are all other examples of accidental innovation (if you don’t believe me, Google them).

There are some amazing stories of innovation within business that should teach us all the importance of ‘play’ in R&D. One of America’s best innovators in the auto-mobile industry, Charles Kettering, reckoned that he could reduce the knocking in an engine by getting the gasoline to fire more quickly. Rather unscientifically he looked for things in nature that started quickly, and noticed that a red plant called trailing arbutus bloomed earlier in the year than most others. ‘Would making gasoline red cause it to fire more quickly’ he wondered. Unable to find any red dye close at hand he added iodine to gasoline to change the colour to red and, lo and behold, it had the desired effect. Incredibly, he later tried to repeat the success by adding red dye believing it to be the colour that was the contributing factor. Did it work? Oddly enough, No.

Whilst we hope to have slightly more structure to our R&D lives here, this story does show that without playtime, or the flexibility to indulge in some slightly ‘haphazard’ working practices, then true innovation could be well and truly stunted. Kettering himself once said: ‘If you have always done it that way, it is probably wrong.’

We’ll have to bear that in mind when looking at the teams’ time-sheets, I suppose.

Filed under: Innovation by simonedwards