Pursuit of Products

Our most innovative toys began from failed experiments, seemingly useless discoveries and unforeseen potential.

“Earlier this year, Facebook Reality Labs (FRL) unveiled Half Dome, an industry-first prototype headset whose eye-tracking cameras, wide-field-of-view optics, and independently focused displays demonstrated the next step in lifelike VR experiences. By adjusting its displays to match your eye movements, Half Dome’s varifocal design makes every virtual object come into sharp focus.” — Oculus Blog December 19, 2018

If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be called research, would it?

— Albert Einstein.

“A scientist’s job is to discover new knowledge through experimentation and observation. True scientific discovery is finding something new that no one knew existed before. By definition, scientists are searching for the unknown. For the entrepreneur looking to disrupt the research and development link of the value chain, opportunity abounds, precisely because most scientists working in primary research and development are creating new discoveries with little thought about how, or why, to bring them to market.” — Disrupt You! by Jay Samit.

Disrupt You! by Jay Samit is an abysmal tale of failure. Innovative failure is the precursor to product advancement. Researchers spend years developing ideas only to find frustration and futility. The original work is discovered by another person from an unrelated field, repurposed to produce advances that were unimaginable to the original scientist. There are labs in universities that have discoveries with seemingly no purpose today. Projects can be displaced after many years of work as funding runs out. Medical research is open sourced for others to commercialize, and tech startups share their work for collaboration more than ever before. In WWII, all resources were devoted to recycling scrap metal and old tires. These were needed from the boots on soldiers and wheels on fighter planes. The U.S. was using rubber originating from Southeast Asia, the Pacific Theater making it vital to produce alternatives for rubber. The first synthetic was made by an engineer at General Electric in 1943, James Wright, when he fused boric acid and silicone. It appeared superior to natural rubber, because it stretched more and bounced higher when dropped. Furthermore, Wright’s synthetic rubber had a high melting point. But it failed. Wright could not figure out a way for the fake rubber to permanently hold shape. So it was never used in WWII. It wasn’t until an executive on Madison Ave noticed how children and grown adults couldn’t help but squeeze this blob, that Wright’s synthetic rubber turned into the Silly Putty. NASA even found a practical use for Silly Putty, as an adhesive tool belt used to strap equipment in space. Things that appear useless now, may not be tomorrow.

“Nanoleaf is a pioneer and never intends to follow others. If someone else in the world is making something, we will not make the same thing. We believe that people should work together to push the boundaries of technology and design as they exist today.” — Nanoleaf.

A new generation of toys were spawned from James Wright’s original failure. Wham-O produced the self proclaimed “the bounciest ball in the world” after Norman Stingley’s Zectron polymer gave birth to the Super Ball. Wham-O next created a toy line called Super Elastic Bubble Plastic, infamous now for its fumes but beloved by children when it released in 1970. Perhaps the most impressive toy is the Magic Rocks growing kits that originally were invented by James and Arthur Ingoldsby. Over the course of a day, crystals from inside an aquarium like container magically grew like stalactites in a cave. A Kutol Chemicals worker named Joseph McVicker discovered a wallpaper cleaner in the 1950s that was non-toxic and malleable. Out of curiosity or coincidence, the cleaning clay was given as toys to schools in Ohio, apparently when kids didn’t enjoy sculpting real clay in class. McVicker’s fake clay was more fun to squeeze and stretch, becoming Play-Doh which has sold over two billion cans since its debut in 1956. Other toys began as accidents too. A naval engineer named Richard James was tasked with building a meter gauging horsepower of vessels. When tinkering around, James dropped a coil on the ground. This coil took a life of its own, bouncing all over. James promptly borrowed $500 to produce four hundred individual coils, which were named “Slinky” by James’ wife Betty. A story recalls James wandering into a store in Philadelphia, and displaying to a crowd his coil sliding down a ramp. After people witnessed the mechanical alloy slithering by itself, four hundred units sold out in two hours. These toys remain as memories of our youth.

“Many inventions and scientific discoveries are cast off because they’re ahead of their time or don’t fit the strategic direction of the company developing them. Finally, market factors that might have made something too costly or inefficient when it was being developed might have changed over time, making the development of the product more affordable. Billions of dollars worth of discoveries are filed away and nearly forgotten, waiting for the disruptor to come along and breathe life into them.” — Disrupt You! by Jay Samit.

“Invention, my dear friends, is 93% perspiration, 6% electricity, 4% evaporation, and 2% butterscotch ripple.”

— Willy Wonka in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Outside of oddities and quirky children’s toys, the technology community has been harnessing so called innovative accidents. One example is literally Quirky. Essentially, Quirky is a crowd sourced research and development group that brings hundreds and thousands of people together to build big stuff like this. The startup resembles a gaming platform, because individuals come together in mass numbers determining what gets built. The sheer breadth and depth of their contributions decides everything from beginning to end. The inventing, patenting, production, sales and marketing is all done by Quirky’s community. Most inventions are purely utilitarian. It includes an invention that separates eggs easily, the latest version of a Swiss Army knife, and a device that directly extracts juice from lemons. Most impressive is Pivot Power, a bendable power strip that looks like a LEGO. You wonder how these things didn’t get invented earlier. Remember, we once used glass shampoo bottles in showers and motor oil containers that you had to stab with a pick, before pouring it in the engine. Designed for office desks, Pivot Power frees the clutter of wires while molding to fit around all sorts of shapes. Pivot Power’s creator Jake Zien was 24 years when he made it. After joining Quirky in 2010, Zien’s device made $350,000 by 2013. Ben Kaufman is Quirky’s founder. Kaufman funded his first venture when his parents took out a second mortgage on their home. That was used to fund Kaufman’s first startup Mophie. Mophie made iPhone/iPod accessories, before Kaufman created Quirky. Thousands of submissions are made to the website, while about three or four get green-lit each week. Quirky’s products are sold by Target and Best Buy, with hundreds of products total. Innovation is always collaborative, sometimes better by accident.

“It was Quirky that did the overwhelming majority of the work, and I see the product’s success as a perfect storm combination of factors, such as my timing in submitting the idea, rather than a complete testament to the quality of the submission. “

— Jake Zien. Founder of Pivot Power.

“When computers went from having monochromatic screens with phosphorus-green text to featuring full color, TV-like display, I knew it wasn’t going to be long before users were going to want to see and use real photos on those screens.”

— Disrupt You! by Jay Samit.