If innovation has an iconography, it entails a genius, a breakthrough and a splash of serendipity. Alexander Fleming notices mould rising on a plate of micro organism and discovers penicillin. John Snow produces a map of the victims of a cholera outbreak in Nineteenth-century London and traces the outbreak to a single water pump. A German chemist known as August Kekulé falls asleep, desires about snakes consuming their tails and realises upon waking that the benzene molecule has the form of a circle.
