Origin Story

Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp had a question at the end of a snowy evening in Paris, when they tried to hail a taxi and couldn’t get one.

Did you know the Olympics started with a beautiful question? The question was raised by Baron Pierre de Coubertin of France, who founded the International Olympic Committee in 1894 to tackle this lofty, ambitious idea: Might it be possible to reduce international...

Challenging students to grapple with real-life questions can help them to grasp abstract concepts, notes Cornell business school professor Robert H. Frank. That’s why Frank asks his pupils to “pose an interesting question based on something they have observed or...

With the creation of Water.org, the engineer/activist Gary White teamed up with actor Matt Damon to tackle the problem of nearly 1 billion people lacking access to safe water. The conventional approach was to raise charitable donations to drill wells “and basically...

The rise of a number of today’s top tech firms can be traced to a “Why doesn’t somebody …” or “What if we were to…” question, in some cases inspired by the founder’s personal experience. One such example, which has become a modern classic business story, is the origin...

When pro golfer Jack Nicklaus was hired in the 1980s to design a golf course on Grand Cayman Island, he faced a difficult challenge: The island, a mere six miles wide and 22 miles long, was too small to accommodate a full-sized course. In his first whack at the...

Back in 1976, long before there was a Google to field all of our queries, a young man named Van Phillips started asking the question above, first in his head and then aloud. Phillips felt his future depended upon finding a good answer and no one seemed to have one for...

Daniel Ek’s initial question was, “Why hasn’t anyone made a version of Napster that works for both consumers AND artists?” Then he had a second question.

During the World War II years, Percy Spencer, a self-taught engineer leading the power tube division at defense contractor Raytheon, focused his efforts on the magnetron—the core tube that made radars so powerful they enabled U.S. bombers to spot periscopes on German...

The exigencies of war have brought forth many a beautiful question. In 1859, a young Swiss Calvinist named Henry Dunant traveling in Italy came upon the aftermath of a bloody battle between the Austrian and French armies. On the battlefield some 40,000 men lay dead or...

Many companies and even entire industries can be traced back to a question—but they’re usually not as odd as this one. In 1965, Dwayne Douglas, a football coach at the University of Florida, wondered, Why aren’t the players urinating more after the games? The coach...

In 1902 Alabama tourist Mary Anderson watched her New York streetcar driver struggling to see through his snow-covered windshield and wondered, Why doesn’t someone create a device to remove the snow? (The “someone,” of course, became Mary, designer of the first...

When electric typewriters became popular in the 1950s, the ribbons made it harder to erase typing errors—a problem noticed by Bette Nesmith Graham. Graham worked two jobs: bank secretary (and heavy typist) by day, commercial artist at night. One night while doing...

Edwin Land was a brilliant inventor, sometimes described today as the Steve Jobs of his time. He was capable of seeing new possibilities—at times coming to him as detailed, fully-formed visions—that others could not begin to imagine. Yet even Land couldn’t see the...

A few years ago, I wrote in the Wall Street Journal Speakeasy blog about the “billion-dollar app that we’re all born with” and even made a short video about it. The app in question—no surprise to readers of this site—is our natural-born aptitude for asking questions....

Early in its history, the microprocessor company Intel found itself facing a difficult decision. The company had started out making computer memory chips and its success with that product enabled Intel to establish itself. But as the memory chip business began to slow...