A lot of big inventions were discovered " by chance ". Let's take the case of the penicillin. In 1928 the scholar Alexander Fleming discovers it after to have forgotten a culture of mushrooms in his laboratory. He notices that a mildew that had developed (Penicillium notatum) killed all the bacteria around the mushrooms. 17 years later he shared the Nobel price of medicine.

Another example, the discovery of Velcro. While taking a walk in the mountains, Georges De Mestrallet, engineer, is irritated by the small balls of a plant that hang themselves to its clothing and to the hairs of his dog. The tiny hooks of the seeds of bardane that it observes to the microscope give him the idea of the closing Velcro.

Velcro has become a multinational corporation.

There are hundreds of examples of this type as the history of the Archimedes principle discovered in his bath, the apple of Newton (universal gravitation) or the post-it and its adhesive that sticks and puts back itself, etc.

These examples show that persons in contact with a circumstance, capitalize on that by making their creativity work.

This astonishing faculty carries a name:

The serendipity, or the creative exploitation of the unforeseen.

1) The serendipity is the art to do a happy encounter and to exploit this position to your advantage. As the history of the Mc Donald's hamburger restaurants. Ray kroc, salesman of milk-shake machines, fascinated by the concept, encounter the Mc Donald's brothers, convince them to let him take care of the franchising and some years later repurchases the rights of their corporation for 2.7 million us dollars. You know the continuation