Here’s one of my favourite stories from Atul Gawande’s book, Better:

“Five years later, Albert Sabin published the results of an alternative polio vaccine he had used in an immunization campaign in Toluca, Mexico, a city of a hundred thousand people, where a polio outbreak was in progress. His was an oral vaccine, easier to administer than Salk’s injected one. It was also a live vaccine, containing weakened but intact poliovirus, and so it could produce not only immunity but also a mild contagious infection that would spread the immunity to others. In just four days, Sabin’s team managed to vaccinate more than 80 percent of the children under the age of eleven—26,000 children in all. It was a blitzkrieg assault. Within weeks, polio had disappeared from the city. This approach, Sabin argued, could be used to eliminate polio from entire countries, even the world. The only leader in the West who took him up on the idea was Fidel Castro. In 1962, Castro’s Committee for the Defense of the Revolution organized 82,366 local committees to carry out a succession of weeklong house-to-house national immunization campaigns using the Sabin vaccine. In 1963, only one case of polio occurred in Cuba.”

It describes a classic contradiction: what was Albert Sabin trying to improve? Answer: he was trying to vaccinate lots of children. What was stopping him: injected vaccines were slow to administer, and because every child had to be individually vaccinated, lots of vaccine was required and the time needed to inject everyone was considerable.

A classic vulnerability-versus-speed or vulnerability-versus-amount-of-substance conflict. Which, if we look both up on the Contradiction Matrix give us the following ranked list of Inventive Principles:

Of which, Sabin’s solution deployed three:

Principle 35, Parameter Change – switching from an injected to an oral vaccine, and, perhaps more significant…

Principle 13, The Other Way Around – using a ‘live’ vaccine, and,

Principle 9, Prior-Counteraction – producing a mild contagious reaction in the first children to be vaccinated, that would then spread to many of the other children.

Sabin, of course, didn’t have access to the Contradiction Matrix when he devised his genius solution. His solution, however, offers us exactly the sort of case-study that our research continues to feed into the Matrix. So that everyone else in similar situations is able to access that genius.