Learn from the Inventors

Invention is an activity that is full of risk, involving failure as much as success. The inventors in this section met with some kind of obstacle or difficulty in their life or work, and decided to invent their way to a solution.

Some of them, like artist Lydia O’Leary, used tools and materials that they already knew to arrive at a new product--in her case, a highly effective concealer cosmetic that she first used to conceal her own birthmark. Others, like Akhil Madhani, took a tried and true procedure and asked how it could be done differently. “What if you could do heart surgery without making that big hole in [a patient’s] chest?,” Madhani proposed. “What if you could make something that went in between the ribs, so that you didn’t have to break any ribs at all?”