Creative Responses to Errors

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Many commercially successful products have come from failed experiments and mistakes.  Ivory soap, whose claim to fame is that it floats, was developed in the late eighteen hundreds by accident.  An absent minded operator forgot to turn off the mixing machine when he went for lunch.  It whipped so much air into a batch of soap that it appeared to be ruined.  In the end, Proctor and Gamble decided that they couldn't afford to discard it and processed it for sale anyway.  Before long they were besieged with orders for the new ‘floating soap'.  With slick advertising it soon became a best seller.

A more recent example of capitalizing on product failure is the ever popular post-it note.  They were first developed by Art Fry, an employee of the 3M company.  Art sang in the church choir and was often frustrated because the scraps of paper he used to mark the hymn selections fell out.  Typically this happened at awkward times in the performance.

Art's mind wandered a little during the sermon one day, and he thought of an adhesive that one of his colleagues had discarded as a failure.  Evidently it wasn't strong enough to stick permanently.  Perhaps it might be useful as a temporary bookmark, Art thought.  So he went back to the lab and began making himself some bookmarks.  Since that time, over twenty years ago, millions of ‘post it' notes have been sold around the world.

So next time you make a mistake, think creatively and try to capitalize on it.