Want to innovate? Try using your kitchen blender …

How one woman cooked up some entrepreneurial magic on her kitchen table

The kitchen blender has a lot to answer for. These days there are plenty of experiments with what you can cram into the jug and then blur into a fine emulsion — not all of them entirely edible. But whilst it might permit all sorts of interesting smoothies it would be a slightly odd mind which decided to try and make one up out of egg white and titanium dioxide. Doesn’t sound like it would delight the taste buds — but then again it might have other uses, not least as a source of innovation.

I enjoy writing. Not least because if I make mistakes there’s a simple set of keystrokes to erase them and I can start all over again. But it wasn’t always so simple. I’ve still got my typewriter on which I first started trying to bash words out — and gave up because of the unequal struggle between me and the tangled levers and mis-typed manuscripts.

But it wasn’t just amateurs like me — professional secretaries had the same challenge and they were usually measured (and often paid) by the number of words per minute (wpm) they could type. Accurately. Make a mistake — and you had to go…