TakeAway: Some of today’s most common products became hits because their manufacturers, or in many cases ordinary consumers, noticed unplanned uses for them.
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Excerpted from Forbes, “Inventions That Were Accidents” By Elaine Wong, December 23, 2010
They say that necessity is the mother of invention. But sometimes pure chance is.
- Kellogg’s Corn Flakes came about when two brothers forgot to properly store wheat and then noticed that it came out as flakes when later processed. They soon applied the same procedure to other types of grain.
- Procter & Gamble, which started as a candle- and soap-making company, discovered by chance that its Ivory soap could be made to float – a quality that somehow communicated “clean” to consumers – when an employee left the mixture for it churning and went to lunch. Air seeped in, but the resulting cakes of soap were shipped out anyway. Americans loved the new, floating cleanser.
- Kleenex was originally developed for removing cold cream. Ernest Mahler, the head of research at Kimberly-Clark, had hay fever and started using the tissue as a disposable handkerchief. The consumer goods company then began advertising it as “the handkerchief you can throw away.” Sales doubled, and Kleenex went on to become, and remain, the world’s top facial tissue.
- Sometimes, inventions arise in a moment of frustration or anger. That happened when George Crum, a restaurant cook, sliced up potatoes as thin as possible to serve to a customer displeased with the way his spud was cooked. The result was the world’s first potato chip.
Edit by AMW
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Full Article:
http://www.forbes.com/2010/12/23/ten-accidental-inventions-leadership-cmo-network-common.html
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