Serendipity, Error, and Exaptation
Introduction
Throughout history, there have been many innovations that have been discovered purely by chance or accident as a result of testing or experiments that had nothing to do with the innovation in question (Austin et al., 2012). In most businesses today as well as those in the past have focused a lot of attention the creation of new and better ideas to help them either gain a market advantage or improve upon something that is already been discovered/created. For this discussion the researcher will provide an example of an innovation that was discovered through one of the following ways; serendipity, error or exaptation.
The meaning of serendipity, error, and exaptation and innovation examples that were discovered by each
Serendipity: It was Horace Walpole that originally coined the word in 1754 when he added it to a letter that he had written (Holubar, 1991). An example of serendipity in my experience is when my wife found over $80 in the pockets of some of her jeans that she had not worn in months.
An example of an innovation discovery that was achieved through serendipity would be the following: It was George de Mestral in the early 1950s that discovered the innovation of Velcro after he noticed a bunch of cockleburs on his coat after walking home one night (Mendonça et al., 2008). After observing the cockleburs in a microscope de Mestral noticed that they were covered with what could be called a hook. The hooks stuck to the fabric of his coat and from that knowledge he obtained from the cockleburs soon became what we know today as Velcro (Mendonça et al., 2008).
Error: Many famous inventions were discovered not because of a brilliant innovation but because of a failed invention or experiment. An example of an error in my experience that turned into an innovation would be errors found in computer code. There are several arcade games that have cheat codes that we know today as walkthroughs or codebooks. When a game is known as Galaga and the flaw in the code allows the game to run out of bullets and the game no longer fires, which allows the person playing the game to complete every stage with ease (Kohler, 2005). Most if not every game invented has some sort of flaw that can be exploited to cheat in the game (Yan & Randell, 2005). I personally used flawed coding to beat arcade games in the past.
An example of an innovation discovery that was achieved through an error in 1942 by Dr. Harry Coover who at the time was trying to isolate clear plastic (Sundaram & Keenan, 2010). During the experiment, he discovered that the chemicals he was using (as cyanoacrylates) would harden and form a bond within seconds after contacting air, and this led to the discovery of super glue.
Exaptation: In 1982 the word exaptation was introduced by Stephen Jay Gould and Elisabeth Vrba (Gould & Vrba, 1982). A good example of exaptation would be bird feathers, feathers kept dinosaurs warm, but the dinosaurs were unable to fly (Andriani & Cattani, 2016). So, what started off as thermoregulation then evolved into a means of allowing flight by birds.
Conclusion
Many of the innovations that have been discovered today happened purely by chance or accident as a result of testing or experiments that had nothing to do with the original purpose intended. Innovation has been discovered in many ways including through serendipity, error, and exaptation. Most businesses today have primarily been focused on the creation of new and better ideas to help them either gain a market advantage or improve upon something that is already been discovered/created. Most if not all the innovations that we use daily were most likely invented or improved through some form of error, mistake or simply by chance or pure luck.
References
Andriani, P., & Cattani, G. (2016). Exaptation is a source of creativity, innovation, and diversity:
introduction to the Special Section. Industrial and Corporate Change, 25(1), 115–131. doi:10.1093/icc/dtv053
Austin, R. D., Devin, L., & Sullivan, E. E. (2012). Accidental innovation: Supporting valuable
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Holubar, K. (1991). Serendipity--its basis and importance.
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Mendonça, S., Cunha, M. P. E., & Clegg, S. R. (2008, June). Unsought innovation: serendipity in
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Indian journal of urology: IJU: journal of the Urological Society of India, 26(3), 374.
Yan, J., & Randell, B. (2005). Security in computer games: from pong to online poker.
The University of Newcastle upon Tyne, Computing Science.
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