“If it’s not on Strava – it didn’t happen!” It’s a daily mantra amongst the swimming, running and riding (particularly those who do all three in one event) fraternity that the BattleAxe “relaxes” with.
Few of them realise that Strava came about following an accident. Mark Gainey, the founder, suffered serious injuries when his bike hit a pothole, shattering his left arm. Like lots of good products Strava went from the germ of an idea, one Gainey’d had at college, to launch in 2009 and now has £54m of investment - even if it still hasn’t made a profit.
If he hadn’t had time recovering from 11 operations, would we ever know the heights the BattleAxe has cycled to this week?
Prompted by the thought, the BattleAxe trawls the archives, looking for household names that only became so as a result of something going Pete Tong.
Probably the best known is something that the BattleAxe avoids because of a serious allergy – Penicillin. A discarded, contaminated Petri dish grew mould that, Fleming noticed, was killing the bacteria around it.
More promisingly, Percy Spencer ended up with a pocket of sticky “candy” when working on radar research. Putting kernels near the machine and getting popcorn, he discovered the microwave. He didn’t do quite so well with his second attempt – an egg that exploded!
Scotchgard was developed to stop engines from deteriorating. A spillage on a shoe which, unexpectedly, stayed clean whilst the rest of the footwear succumbed to the grime of day to day life saw the development of this indispensable protector.
A haphazard Canon engineer resting his soldering iron on his pen saw ink shoot out – and the inkjet printer was born!
Looking up from Wikipedia the Chief Elf added to the list, “X-rays, Post-It Notes, Silly Putty, the contraceptive pill, Viagra, potato chips, the slinky,….”
“STOP!” exclaimed the BattleAxe, “we could be here all day!”
“Is there anything that didn’t happen by accident?” mused the Chief Elf.
“Of course there has been!” The BattleAxe mused: “Makes you wonder though, how many amazing ideas or products get missed because a business owner writes something off as a bad job? Some people succeed by coming up with an idea and sticking with it, but the real commercial brains are the ones that can spot opportunity where others only see disaster.
That ability to take a step back, brush yourself down, look past the debris on your work bench and see the next product to take the world by storm is a mark of product genius. Even when a product doesn’t take off, it’s original concept is a disaster, it’s no longer useful or people start to use it differently - who’d have thought we’d use a mobile phone to take photographs!, take a moment to think, can it be adapted, re-purposed or even taken apart and used for a new invention?”
“You still need the spark of an idea of course, and you could do worse than listen to that often heard customer feedback: “If only you’d got something that would ……..””.
This article originally appeared in Huddersfield Examiner on 14th September 2017
