Invention from Adversity

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Invention from Adversity

July 2, 2008. By Peter Lloyd

As a child, Jerry McLaughlin sampled the fruit of the paw-paw tree, sometimes called the Indiana banana. It made him sick. But cancer patients may one day thank Jerry, because many years later, as a chemist looking for plants that might kill cancer cells, he remembered the paw-paw.

He tested it and extracted a substance that kills cancerous leukemia cells. It's 300 times as effective as taxol from the endangered yew tree.

Mark Gottlieb's father backed over him with the family car when Mark was a child. That experience was the inspiration for the Back-Up Alert--a light bulb that beeps. Just take out your regular backup light and replace it with Gottlieb's.

Lawmakers may save you the trouble by making them standard equipment some day.

Ever wonder who reads your faxes between the fax room and your desk? Peter Castro did and didn't like the idea. So he invented a fax paper that conceals the message until it reaches the person to whom it's addressed.

Some people think pennies are a waste of time and would eliminate it altogether. Michael Rossides hates carrying any change. He proposes a method of eliminating all coins. His plan amounts to a betting game which you'd play every time you reach the checkout counter. The odds would make sure store and customer come out even in the long run, but the process would be fun. And it would save everybody a lot of time and trouble.

What the world needs is fewer left-brainers telling us how bad things are and more creative people willing to do the right-brain thing and make it better.

Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest business problems.

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