Paul Sloane explains how innovation happens across disciplines. An Argentinian mechanic named Jorge O'Donnell watched a magic trick about removing a cork from a bottle, then used the same principle to invent the Odon device, which helps with difficult childbirths.
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Hi, I'm Paul Sloane, and I am the author of Lateral Thinking for Everyday, which is a book which is packed with inspiring stories and practical methods to help you use lateral thinking. Innovative ideas can come from anywhere, but typically you have to be open-minded and curious to be receptive to inputs from other places. An Argentinian car mechanic called Jorge O'Donnell was shown a trick by one of his friends. And then the trick was to get a cork out of an empty wine bottle. And the challenge was, how do you do it? And the trick involves putting a plastic bag into the bottle, juggling the cork around a little until it's in the plastic bag, and then inflating the plastic bag just a little to grip the cork, and then you can pull the cork out. And Jorge went to bed that night, he was very pleased with this new idea, but he woke up in the middle of the night with a brainwave. He asked this question: When is a baby like a cork? A baby stuck in the birth canal of a mother is like a cork stuck in a bottle. And he took that same idea and he applied it to the idea of the baby stuck in the birth canal, and he came up with something called the Odon device, which involves slipping a little plastic cover around the head of the baby, inflating it slightly, and then pulling the baby out. And it's in use, it's all around the world. It's a very simple device manufactured by Becton Dickinson. But the point about the story is this: he didn't approach the problem from the point of view of a clinician, of a doctor or a nurse. He approached the problem from the point of view of a car mechanic. He said, getting a baby out of the birth canal is a mechanical engineering problem. Let's use some mechanical engineering techniques to solve the problem. And very often innovative ideas come from one field and then they're transferred to a different field. And if you are on the lookout And you can see a clever idea in one field and apply it somewhere else. Very often, that is the key to a great innovation.
