Forecasting and prediction

One could easily think of serendipity as a "Happy Accident". Meige (2010) states that serendipity is a manifestation of creativity with inspiration from outside factors or forces. As the Basketball myth goes in 1891, James Naismith nailed two peach baskets to the wall of a gymnasium, the players loved the game. There was only one problem, every time a player shot in the basket someone had to climb a ladder and fetch the ball. After many games the bottoms of the baskets gave way and broke off allowing the ball to fall straight through. Giving rise to a global billion-dollar industry called professional basketball (Innovation in Practice, 2014).

Many inventions by accident or by error have been reported. This inventions happen when one discovers something completely unrelated to what they were trying to make. Two examples are given of Plastic. One says that Charles Goodyear combined rubber and sulfur and accidentally put it on the stove for a period of time, when he came back he found a tough and durable material. The other is a story of Joh Hyatt who accidentally spilled a bottle of collodion only to discover that when it dried up it formed a flexible but strong material and in 1872 his brother coined the term celluloid to describe what we know as plastic (Donnelly, n.d.).

In evolutionary biology exaptation is used to describe an attribute that is adopted for use other than that which natural selection intended it to be used. In a similar manner we could view Exaptation in innovation as a reuse of something other than that which it was intended for. A good example is the microwave oven which was originally designed for radar navigation and later repurposed by Percy spencer for home use.

Innovation by exaptation is indeed very common especially with technology, most of the sophisticated technologies we use now were first adopted for use by the military before being released to the general public. While innovation by errors or by accident are very difficult to tell, for instance the inventors must have set out to look for something and instead came up with another, couldn’t this be serendipity? Or could serendipity also be exaptation? Since it’s something which was supposed to be used for another purpose but then it was repurposed for an entirely different purpose. It also has to be noted that this innovations were not entirely a child of a “big bang” for instance exploitation of radio waves for heating was really made possible by the development of vacuum tube radio transmitters and its applications for use in medical therapy had already begun ("Short wave craft," 1933.

References

Donnelly, T. (n.d.). 9 brilliant inventions made by mistake. Retrieved from http://www.inc.com/tim-donnelly/brilliant-failures/9-inventions-made-by-mistake.html

Innovation in Practice. (2014, May 12). The myth of serendipitous innovation. Retrieved from http://www.innovationinpractice.com/innovation_in_practice/2014/05/the-myth-of-serendipitous-innovation.html

Meige, A. (2010, April 25). Serendipity and Innovation. Retrieved from http://open-your-innovation.com/en/2010/04/25/serendipity-and-innovation/

Short wave craft. (1933, November). The Radio Experimenters magazine.