Some Brilliant Mistakes

After all, if it weren't for a few mistakes, those famous bicycle builders from Dayton, Ohio—Wilbur and Orville Wright—would never have flown for 12 seconds, 120 feet above in Kitty Hawk, N.C. And then there would be no modern aviation.

Or take Thomas Edison. During the 1870s, the inventor of the phonograph and the light bulb encountered a number of misses en route to his legacy of enduring innovations. He picked the wrong business partners and invested in great concepts that unfortunately had no market. But he also learned valuable lessons from those mishaps, such as the importance of doing market research and the need to consider the economic factors of his inventions.

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