Paul Sloane

And in the middle of the night, he woke up with a brainwave.

And the brainwave was this.

He said, getting a baby that's stuck out of the birth canal of a mother is just like getting a cork out of a bottle.

It's the same problem in its essence.

And he went away and he designed a thing called the Odon device, which is to help people in childbirth where the baby is stuck.

And eventually, after a lot of problems, he got Becht and Dickinson to back the idea and they built it.

And it's now in use in many, many countries all around the world because it's cheap and it's effective and it's safe.

And you put the plastic bag around the baby so you inflate it very slightly and then you pull the baby out.

And the point about the story is that he came up with this idea because he didn't think like a doctor or a nurse or a clinician.

He thought like a car mechanic.

And he said, getting a baby out of the birth canal is not a medical problem.

It's a mechanical engineering problem.

And let's use mechanical engineering techniques by taking a completely different approach.

Coming at the problem from an entirely different perspective, he was able to come up with an unexpected solution.

And very often, you know, it's the person who's never been involved in the problem that can come up with a creative idea because they're not constrained by all the assumptions that the experts have.

Time and time again, we see that these things are unexpected, unpredictable, accidental.

But somebody's had the nous, the gumption, the courage to seize the opportunity and do something with it.