The Role of Accidents in Business
How unexpected failures have driven some of the most significant innovations in industrial history
A. The history of technology and business is littered with discoveries and innovations that emerged not from deliberate research but from accidents, errors, and the careful observation of unexpected outcomes. Post-it Note adhesive, the microwave oven, penicillin, X-ray technology, vulcanised rubber, and stainless steel all originated in observations of unintended phenomena — events that might have been dismissed as failures or nuisances but were instead recognised as the starting points for new possibilities. This pattern of accidental discovery is so common that researchers have given it a name: serendipity, from the Persian fairy tale 'The Three Princes of Serendip', whose heroes were famous for their ability to find value in things they were not looking for.
B. Serendipity in innovation does not occur spontaneously or randomly: it tends to cluster in environments and among individuals that are well-positioned to recognise its value. The prepared mind — the person with sufficient knowledge, curiosity, and openness to interpret an anomalous result not as a nuisance to be discarded but as a signal to be pursued — is the essential precondition for serendipitous discovery. Louis Pasteur's observation that 'chance favours the prepared mind' captures this insight: the accidental observation of an unexpected phenomenon is only the beginning; recognising its potential significance and having the knowledge to pursue it are what transform accident into innovation.
C. The organisational conditions that favour serendipitous discovery are at odds with many of the management practices associated with efficient, productive organisations. Serendipity requires slack — time and resources not committed to specific outputs — that allows individuals to pursue unexpected observations outside their formally assigned tasks. It requires tolerance for failure and for activities whose value cannot be demonstrated in advance. It requires the diversity of background and perspective that increases the likelihood that at least one member of a team will recognise the significance of an unexpected result. And it requires physical and social proximity between individuals working on different problems, so that the conversation about an unexpected result in one domain can trigger a recognition of its relevance to another.
D. The history of the pharmaceutical industry provides some of the most consequential examples of accidental discovery. The development of the first class of antidepressant drugs — the monoamine oxidase inhibitors — emerged from the observation that a drug being tested for tuberculosis treatment produced unexpected euphoric side effects in patients. The discovery of the first anti-psychotic drug, chlorpromazine, arose from research on antihistamines: a French surgeon noticed that the drug produced unusual calm in surgical patients and proposed its use in psychiatric settings. The discovery of Viagra's primary action arose from the unexpected reports of a specific side effect during trials for a cardiovascular drug.
E. Industrial accidents — unplanned events that result in property damage, injury, or production disruption — provide a different category of accidental insight. Major industrial disasters, while overwhelmingly negative in their immediate consequences, have in several cases produced safety improvements and process innovations that prevented far greater losses in subsequent decades. The explosion at the Flixborough chemical plant in England in 1974, which killed 28 people and caused massive property damage, led directly to a fundamental revision of chemical plant safety standards across Europe and to the development of safety management systems that have since prevented many incidents of comparable scale. The principle that accidents contain information about systemic vulnerabilities that cannot be obtained from near-miss analysis alone is now central to safety management methodology.
F. The deliberate cultivation of serendipity in innovation environments has attracted growing management attention. Google's famous policy of allowing employees to spend twenty percent of their working time on self-directed projects — which produced Gmail, Google Maps, and Google News among other products — is one of the most widely cited examples of institutionalised slack. Research on the spatial design of research facilities has found that the frequency of spontaneous productive encounters between researchers — and the innovations that result — is significantly influenced by the physical layout of the space: open, convivial spaces that encourage casual interaction between people working on different problems produce more serendipitous discoveries than isolated laboratory settings.