Accidental Innovations - Finding them and making the most out of them

Not all the inventions and innovations are planned meticulously and with a proper design. Some innovations just happen, they come out from nowhere and sometimes from the weirdest of the places; Places where we least expected them to come from. No one of us can forget the famous story about the discovery of penicillin, a drug that changed the lives of so many people.

How many times have a lot of us discovered something new and wondered as to whether it can be converted to something useful? Whether it has already been done before? What can be the future scope of the innovation? How many times have you felt that some product can be used for other purposes than what it is intended for and what have you done in case you felt something like this? These are the very questions that we want to answer by the means of our project.

What we want to study in our project is the nature of the accidental innovations. We want to find out if the accidental innovations are just a fluke or are they a side product of hard work put in by someone who wanted to discover something and ended up discovering something else. In case the latter part is true, we want to find out if we can enhance the chances of such accidents happening more often. Might sound a bit funny, but we want to see – “Can accidents be planned?”

Another issue that we want to deal with here is about the future of such accidental innovations. Since, these innovations by definition are not planned, thus it is very difficult for the innovator to see if the innovation has a substantial usage and if it can be utilized then what the best possible use of the innovation is. Thus, by means of our project we want to give a platform to such people so as to put forward their discoveries which can then be analyzed by experts. We plan to create a forum that will be accessible to common people as well as experts in various fields.

 “Less knowledge can sometimes be a blessing in disguise”, if it is really so, then can we try to make substantial use of this blessing and help it reach a proper end is the question that we are trying to answer in our project.

What we need help from all of you is in relation to the following questions

1)   How to go about reaching out to such people who have more chances of innovating accidently (We are assuming that even accidental innovations have a design)?

2)   Is there any specific field where the chances of accidental innovations is maximum or is it merely related to the amount of research that is happening in a particular field?

3)  How to tap in accidental innovations that commonly occur around us? What can be the various mediums by which we can communicate our presence to such people?

4)   How do we ensure that each (or most) of the accidental innovations reach a logical conclusion or find a proper usage and how the intellectual property rights will be preserved?

It will be really kind of you in case you can come up with suggestions regarding any of these or if you feel that we are missing out on some important aspect or if we can do something else to make our project more usable.

A link that you might find some-what related to this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAH0i7eMfYM

Regards

Ashish Labroo and L Sana Macha