One of the products that I found most profound in Tom Kelley’s “The Art of Innovation” piece was the water bottle that IDEO created for Specialized Bike Components. IDEO first watched bike racers and serious bikers using water bottles to look for new ideas. IDEO discovered two issues: First, bikers struggled to get their water bottles back on their bikes after drinking, and second, actually drinking from the water bottle nozzle was difficult while riding a bike. The first problem was solved rather easily by changing the bottom of the bottle and creating a ring on the bottle to make for an easier grip. To solve the second problem, “the solution, as is so often the case, came from looking at products used for entirely different purposes.” By studying the tricuspid heart valve, IDEO team members were able to mimic this example from nature to create a self-sealing water bottle nozzle.

This example made me think of biomimicry, a concept that, according to this article, is “based on the principle that nature has already perfected an array of elegant mechanical systems.” Innovators, rather than “reinvent the wheel,” have instead “learned to look for the nearest wheel corollary in nature.” The article went on to describe how roboticists at Harvard have created a robot based on the cockroach. Like a cockroach, the robot can “turn sharply and run at high speeds, climb, carry payloads, and survive long drops unharmed.” While perhaps not the most glamorous example, these engineers are focusing on observing what already works in nature and applying it to make new innovations even more successful. This seems to mimic the process outlined in Kelley’s book.