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Serendipity.

I’d be willing to bet that no more than half of you out there can define the word adequately. If you are among the knowledgable, please raise your left hand. Now lift up your right foot and stick out your tongue. OK, now repeat after me: “I wook widicuwous.”

Perhaps the best summation I could find is this one: “finding something fortuitous when looking for something else”. When something is serendipitous we think of it as a “happy accident”.

The Guardian Unlimited, a UK technology reporting website, has a story by Michael Pollitt of how a serendipitous moment may have led to a genuine long-term solution to the problem of counterfeiting, well, just about anything (physical, that is). The solution has to do with laser surface imaging; in other words, making nano-scale images of the surface of practically anything, and using that as an authentication technique. As a security test, it turns out it’s virtually impossible to beat.

But the discovery came about quite by accident, since Professor Russell Cowburn was actually trying to laser image computer chips. It was only when the chip fell off the paper they discovered that the paper holder, and subsequently other surfaces, all had images that were unique at the nano-scale level. What that means is that every passport, every credit card, every document has a unique surface shape – you only had to be able to look close enough to see it!

The ramifications in security technology are immense, to say the least. What’s really awesome about this is that it’s actually unbeatable. So until we perfect Star Trek transporter technology, manufacturing two items exactly alike at that scale will remain virtually impossible.

I did a fast check on other widely-known and used, yet serendipitous discoveries, and here are a few others:

Silly Putty was created while the inventor (actually, it was independently discovered by TWO people – no one knows who was first) was searching for a new artificial rubber compound for use in the war effort (WWII, that is). No one had a use for the stuff, but everyone loved playing with it. (As marketers would say, “It sells itself!”) 4500 tons of the playful glop has been produced since 1949. Now that’s a whole lotta silly.

Teflon (PTFE), the slipperiest solid substance known, was discovered by Roy Plunkett at DuPont in 1938, while he was looking for a new type of gas to be used as a refrigerant (strange to find a solid when looking for a gas, but there it is). Now you find PTFE in practically everyplace you look, from inks to industrial applications. Maybe we should start coating automobiles in it to make the evening commute quicker - instead of getting stuck in traffic jams, cars would pop out of close quarters like watermelon seeds squeezed between your fingers.

Rayon, the first synthetic silk, was invented by Hilaire de Chardonnet, an assistant of Louis Pasteur. When he accidentally spilled a bottle of collodion that was later discovered to have properties that allowed the production of stable fibers, he immediately quit his day job (“I quit. I shall become ze millionaire!”). Or something like that.

Penicillin, Viagra, quinine, Aspirin, vaccination, pap smears, high-temperature superconductivity, radioactivity, Pluto’s moon Charon, metallic hydrogen, to name just a few, along with a host of other items, were all discovered, uncovered, or recovered as a result of a happy accident.

So what’s the moral of this story? Well, unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few years, surely you’ve heard (yeah, yeah, I know – don’t call you Shirley) the latest mantra in business innovation is the idea that in many failures there will be some successes.

Remember, though, we’re not talking about just failures, but purposeful failures. It wasn’t just luck. These folks weren’t just sitting around waiting for the Flying Fickle Finger of Fate to strike. It was their ability to recognize the potential in what they saw that was the key to making them into success stories.

So the next time you experience that sudden wild hair up the fundamental aperture, maybe it’s time to break out the drawing board and see what develops.

But in the meantime - prepare, my friend, prepare.

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