Dr. Horrible invented this Freeze Ray while singing and thinking about a lady named Penny. (credit: Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog)
If you’re smashing your face into the keyboard trying to come up with a brand-new invention, you need to stop and go for a walk. You could also try watching a movie about an unrelated topic. A new book on the process of invention, Inventology by Pagan Kennedy, reveals that roughly half of all inventions started as ideas or discoveries that people had while working on something else.
As Kennedy writes in a recent New York Times article:
One survey of patent holders (the PatVal study of European inventors, published in 2005) found that an incredible 50 percent of patents resulted from what could be described as a serendipitous process. Thousands of survey respondents reported that their idea evolved when they were working on an unrelated project—and often when they weren’t even trying to invent anything.
Kennedy’s book, which grew out of a series of articles for the Times about unusual inventions, explores how people invented everything from sliced bread to the airport wheelie bag. The thread that runs through all of the inventors’ stories is what Kennedy dubs “serendipity,” or stumbling across an idea by chance. The question is whether this kind of serendipity can actually be fostered and encouraged or must simply strike like lightning.
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