Learning From Chance

If you had to pick the five inventions that have had the greatest impact on the world in the last 100 years, there are many candidates to choose from. Aircraft, automobiles, and the Internet are all strong contenders. Among those also having a good case for making the cut is the mobile phone, particularly the smartphone.

Think about your own phone. You may have used it as an alarm to get you out of bed, as a newspaper while the kettle boiled, as a diary to check the day’s appointments, as a Sat-Nav to get you to those appointments, as a book to read at lunch, and as a way to pay for that lunch. You may have even made an actual phone call. And you could be reading this on your phone right now. None of that would be possible if not for a dead frog.

Frog to phone

In the late eighteenth century, during anatomical dissections, Italian physician Luigi Galvani noticed something curious: when the exposed nerves of a dead frog’s legs were touched with a metal scalpel, the limbs twitched as if animated by life. Galvani became convinced he had uncovered evidence of what he called “animal electricity,” a vital force inherent in living tissue.

Fellow Italian Alessandro Volta was sceptical. To Volta, the movement was the result of an electrical circuit created when two different metals touched the moist tissue of the frog. In his view, the frog’s body was acting less as a generator and more as a conductor.

Volta experimented with stacks of alternating discs of copper and zinc separated by brine-soaked cloth. The contraption produced a steady current without any animal involvement. This “Voltaic pile” was the first true battery.

For a while, the battery remained a tool of experimenters until voltaic cells began to find roles in telegraphy, providing the currents that sent signals across wires. And to cut a long story short, what began as scientific curiosity became the foundation of the electrical age and ultimately put that phone in your pocket.

Galvani had been wrong in his explanation, yet his observations provided the spark for Volta’s breakthrough. In a way, without Galvani we wouldn’t have the battery, the telegraph, the dynamo, the power grid, and the modern world of electronics.

The innovation game

Revolutionary innovations emerging from curiosity, accident, or attempts to solve completely different problems is something that repeats throughout technological history. And it is a pattern that reflects a fundamental truth about innovation: creators rarely control how their technologies are ultimately used. The most transformative applications often come from users who approach problems with fresh perspectives, unconstrained by the original design assumptions.

There’s also what scientists call the “adjacent possible” – the realm of potential next steps that emerge from current capabilities. Volta’s battery established electricity as a usable force in communication and industry, powering the first telegraphs, electromagnets, and electrochemistry experiments. Consequently, Michael Faraday discovered electromagnetic induction (how to generate electricity from magnetism), and James Clerk Maxwell unified electricity and magnetism mathematically.

The result: conceptual and practical tools for large-scale power generation. Edison and Tesla then bump their big brains over Direct Current (DC) and Alternating Current (AC) which leads to AC proving to be the safer and more efficient system over long distances and powering the factories and cities of the 20th century. Each innovation created new possibilities that weren’t visible before.

Modern businesses often struggle with this kind of uncertainty. Quarterly earnings calls demand clear revenue projections and defined market opportunities. But the most valuable innovations frequently begin as expensive curiosities with unclear commercial potential.

These days, understanding how serendipity shapes innovation matters more than ever. As artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and biotechnology threaten to upend the world as we know it, the next big breakthrough could be sitting in someone’s laboratory right now seeming to be utterly useless.

But how do we turn curiosity and lucky accidents into innovations?

Pay attention to internal problems

In the early 2000s, Amazon found that their rapid expansion had created an IT infrastructure bottleneck that was throttling innovation. Amazon’s solution—create automated systems that let developers quickly and easily provision computing resources—turned out to be something other companies needed, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched in 2006 with simple storage and computing services. Today, AWS generates over $80 billion annually and powers much of the internet, from Netflix’s streaming service to NASA’s space missions.

So, think about your internal pain points – they may signal broader market opportunities.

Create space for curiosity-driven exploration

Google’s famous “20% time” policy in the 2000s allowed engineers to spend one day per week on personal projects, generating innovations like Gmail and Google News. Even small amounts of unstructured time can yield unexpected insights.

Get innovations into users’ hands early

The most creative applications often come from people outside your organisation – Volta’s battery was basically a boffin’s toy until someone else found a use for it.

Consider open APIs, pilot programmes, and beta testing communities which can allow external creativity to enhance your innovations. And remember that many breakthrough technologies spend years in development before finding their killer application.

Maintain diverse research portfolios

Companies that encourage cross-pollination between different teams and stay connected to academic research are more likely to recognise opportunity when it appears.

This preparation requires cultural foundations that support experimentation, tolerate failure, and reward curiosity even when immediate applications aren’t obvious. The most innovative companies create psychological safety that allows teams to pursue interesting problems and reward curiosity and experimentation.

Conclusion

From Volta’s battery to Amazon’s cloud computing platform, history’s most transformative innovations often emerge from curiosity, necessity, or sheer accident rather than strategic planning.

This doesn’t mean businesses should abandon careful planning in favour of random experimentation. Rather, the most successful companies balance focused development with space for serendipitous discovery.

The future belongs not just to those who plan effectively, but to those who remain alert to possibility, are patient with uncertainty, and are prepared to recognise genius when it emerges from the most unexpected places.

Jamie Dobson is the founder of Container Solutions, and has been helping companies, across industries, move to cloud native ways of working for over ten years. Container Solutions develops a strategy, a clear plan and step by step implementation helping companies achieve a smooth digital transformation.

With services including Internal Developer Platform Enablement, Cloud Modernisation, DevOps/DevSecOps, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Consultancy, Cloud Optimisation and creating a full Cloud Native Strategy, companies get much more than just engineering know-how.

Jamie is also author of ‘The Cloud Native Attitude’ and the recently published ‘Visionaries, Rebels and Machines: The story of humanity’s extraordinary journey from electrification to cloudification’.  Both are available from Amazon and good bookstores.