We humans learn by copying; so do animals. If everything were copied to perfection, there would be no innovation and invention. Just look at Nature. DNA is copied and evolution occurs only if it is copied incorrectly. I suspect that some of the innovations are the result of a process that was not done “correctly.” Somebody screwed up a job and it turned out better. We would probably still be rubbing sticks for fire if we relied only on the “false copying” method of innovation.

One way how we force innovation is by introducing errors. For example, this is how pharmaceutical research works: Rather than feeding lab mice regular food you give them something different and then watch what happens. It is an “enlightened trial and error.”

We say that an invention was “inevitable,” but only in retrospect: “Well, sure, this was inevitable.” I suppose that going from a horse buggy to a car was “inevitable,” once the gasoline engine was invented. It was noticed in the film that many inventions occurred almost at the same time in different places. This might be a definition of an inevitable invention. It looks like that the conditions, the accumulated knowledge, the need was such the the invention popped out.

How about an invention that was not “inevitable”? Well, there was an engineer at 3M working on a better glue. He developed a lousy glue, but he turned the failure in a success and we got “Post-it” notes.