Why Thomas Edison's pitch deck was wrong—a look at serendipity in R&D
It's 1878. You're Thomas Edison, and you've just managed to pull off something that has been unimaginable for all of human history. You've managed to capture and preserve sound so that it can be reproduced at any time. In other words, you just invented audio recording. You dip your pen in the ink pot on your desk and prepare to write a draft for an article in the North American Review to describe this new achievement. Surely, this is a breakthrough invention that holds a lot of potential. But what will you put forward as the primary use case for this new thing?
The list
Today, the answer seems incredibly obvious. It has to be music, right?
Well, not quite. In Edison's North American Review article, music actually ranked 4th, right below "the teaching of elocution".
Here's the entire list from the magazine, reproduced verbatim:
() Letter writing and all kinds of dictation without the aid of a stenographer.
() Phonographic books which will speak to blind people without effort on their part.
() The teaching of elocution
() Reproduction of music
() The 'Family Record' - a registry of sayings, reminiscences, etc., by members of a family in their own voices, and of the last words of dying persons.
() Music-boxes and toys.
() Clocks that should announce in articulate speech the time for going home, going to meals, etc.
() The preservation of languages by exact reproduction of the manner of pronouncing.
() Educational purposes; such as preserving the explanations made by a teacher, so that the pupil can refer to them at any moment, and spelling or other lessons placed upon the phonograph for convenience in committing to memory.
() Connection with the telephone so as to make the instrument an auxiliary in the transmission of permanent and invaluable records, instead of being the recipient of momentary and fleeting communications.
Today, this list can strike us as peculiar and funny. Some of the use cases seem strange and niche whereas the most popular or obvious uses of the technology seem to be mentioned almost in passing.
But the truth is that at the time, there was nothing obvious about the direction this new invention was going to take. Edison's 'pitch-deck' couldn't predict the future clearly because he was operating on the forefront of what was possible and he had no real precedents to work with.
The inventors of Arpanet or the World Wide Web would have found it equally impossible to imagine the ways in which the internet would transform the world. The same goes for AI today. We know that we stand at the brink of a new world but it's difficult to imagine how it manifests years or decades from now.
If there's a moral to the Edison story above, it's that research and development is never a straightforward path. R&D is a process where you don't know exactly what you have in hand at any point in time. It's more important to create a culture of inventing, innovating, and discovering than to force linearity and try to control outcomes. The former is exactly what Edison did.
The R&D journey
Engineers, scientists, and innovators often start with a clear picture of what they want to achieve but then life throws curve-balls their way. For instance, the development process could take much longer than expected, maybe years. It might not yield the results for which the search was initiated in the first place. It could lead the researcher down unexpected rabbit holes that prove to be huge time sinks.
When standing at the threshold of an unexpected idea, should one forcefully turn one's attention back to the original quest or abandon oneself to the exciting possibilities of the new path and dive down it headfirst?
When looking at the examples of successful inventions in the past, one thing we can say with certainty is that they did not say no to the latter. One also realizes that for the very serious business of research and invention, you need a trait that seems not so serious...
Playfulness and curiosity
That's right. The desire to play around and toy with something is crucial when it comes to R&D. Without it, you might stumble on something world-changing and never realize it. All because you abandoned it too quickly and refused to play.
Let's consider the post-it. The team at 3M that worked on it intended to create a super strong adhesive. However, over the course of their research and experimentation, they ended up with a weak one instead. Instead of throwing it away and forgetting all about it, they toyed with it and tested it out until someone realized a weak adhesive that is pressure sensitive and doesn't leave a residue may actually have some use in the world. And thanks to them, we know when that work deadline is due and what needs restocking in the fridge.
Lateral thinking
Instead of being pedantically steadfast in their mission to create something, good researchers possess the ability to take an unexpected outcome and run with it. They are able to shift their perspective from seeing an outgrowth in the context of the original mission, i.e. as an accident, to seeing it as a new thing with unknown potential.
This openness to unexpected outcomes then allows them to tinker with it and experiment with the outgrowth till they eventually find applications for it.
Taking existing mature technology and using it in a new context also yields incredible success sometimes. Gaming company Nintendo built its fortunes on the back of this approach. Gunpei Yokoi, the Nintendo visionary and inventor of the Game Boy, termed it "lateral thinking with withered technology." Instead of looking for serendipity at the cutting edge, this philosophy looks for serendipity in fresh combinations of older tech. (Yokoi even stated that cutting-edge technology can often get in the way of developing a new product.)
One of those moments of serendipity happened when Yokoi spotted a Japanese businessman on the bullet train pressing the buttons on his LCD calculator out of boredom. It occurred to him then that a device that combined the functionality of an everyday gadget and a video game could be a success. However, it did not attempt to push the envelope in any scientific field; it just remixed easily available tech and materials – LCD screens, cheap processors, etc. – into a fun package. The Game & Watch was a smash hit.
Patience and persistence
Good scientists and engineers don't let go of an idea just because it hasn't found its home immediately. They file it away in their mental shelves to check on every once in a while over days, months, maybe even years.
For example, super glue (yes, another adhesive) was not the holy grail its inventor initially sought. Harry Coover Jr was actually working on a material suitable for precision gunsights during World War II. One of the materials that came out of the process stuck to everything, and eventually became super glue when he realized its potential. But the material was found in 1942 while he worked at B.F. Goodrich and was sold as an adhesive only a decade later in 1958, when Coover had moved to Eastman Kodak.
Inventing a culture of invention
The journey of R&D is filled with unknown unknowns. We've looked at the role serendipity plays in this process. We've also seen what traits or attitudes researchers and engineers need to have to maximize their exposure to this luck. But what can be done at an organizational level to create a culture that encourages risk-taking and innovation? Let's take a look at it in the next part of this blog.
