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By Root 491 0

exception as a rule. The statistical probabilities of successfully rerouting commercial reality were laid bare for me by a wry venture capitalist who had come to the fair with few expectations, save for having the opportunity to spend a day away from his office. Of the two thousand business plans he received a year, he said, he immediately threw out 1,950, scrutinised fifty more closely and ended up investing in ten. Within five years, out of those ten enterprises, four would be bankrupt, another four would be stuck in what was termed a ‘graveyard cycle’ of low profits and a mere two would be generating the significant returns which keep his industry afloat. Here was a vision of success guaranteed to disappoint 99.9 percent of its subscribers.

Then again, there was a certain heroic beauty in the exuberant destruction of both capital and hope entailed by the entrepreneurs’ activities. Money patiently accumulated through decades of unremarkable work would, in a rush of optimism inspired by a flattering business plan, be handed over to a momentarily convincing chief executive, who would hasten to set the pyre alight in a brief, brilliant and largely inconsequential blaze.

Almost all of the exhibitors at the fair were destined to throw themselves at the cliff face of entrepreneurial achievement and fall flat; for example, people like Paul Nolan, who had come up with a system of tilt-out under-bath shelves on which to store cleaning products and toiletries, or Edward van Noord, a publican from Amsterdam who had devoted his life’s savings to the development of 1-2-3 Stop Fire, a disposable fire-extinguishing system with a restricted applicability in the real world – just two of the many participants of the fair who would one day be compelled to return to more modest ways of anchoring the motives for their existence.

Nevertheless, these entrepreneurs could at least be celebrated for embodying an honourably stubborn side of human nature, one which in other areas causes us to get married without duress and to behave as if death might be an avoidable condition. They were proof of the extent to which we ultimately prefer excitement and disaster to boredom and safety.

In the early afternoon, I dropped in on a session of the British Inventors’ Society, where one of the members was unveiling an idea for a deodorant-dispensing machine designed to be installed in railway stations – a concept premised on his realisation that he and his fellow commuters were prone to sweat prodigiously on their way to and from crowded city platforms. The society’s members were united by their belief that the manner in which the world was presently organised was in no way representative of its full potential. They were in the habit of scanning their homes and environments for anything which did not function optimally: rubbish bags which declined to close securely, lunchboxes which were too hard to clean or parking posts which would have been better off retracting automatically when lorries backed over them. Although I had never invented anything, as the afternoon drew on (and the after-effects of a few glasses of wine I had ordered over lunch kicked in), I felt able to share with the group some of my own tentative notions for businesses as yet missing from the world economy, including a new kind of holiday company which would take tourists around industrial locations rather than museums; a chain of secular chapels which atheists could visit to appease their confused religious yearnings; and restaurants which would focus on offering diners instruction in the arts of friendship and conversation rather than on the food itself. Even among people as broad-minded as the inventors, my list precipitated a tense silence.

It has often been said that while any fool can have a good idea, only a few great minds have it in them to start a profitable business. The members of the British Inventors’ Society seemed to turn this unflattering equation on its head (pleasingly so in the eyes of a writer, a species congenitally fated to be better at thinking up ideas than