innovation - the best thing since sliced bread!
Some valuable lessons from a sliced loaf of bread
I’ve always wanted to be a baker, in another life.
That smell of baking bread stops me in my tracks. It’s a bit like Mr. Toad in that famous book, The Wind in the Willows. Toad is happily touring the countryside in his canary yellow caravan when a motor car roars past and tips the caravan into a ditch. Ratty is furious, Mole seizes the horse, and Toad just sits in the middle of the dusty road, gazing after the car in a trance, murmuring, “Poop-poop!” The wreckage doesn’t matter—he’s seen the new thing, and he’s hooked.
That’s me, still, when a loaf comes out of the oven. If I’m honest, it’s me with most new things. Unfortunately, transfixed isn’t the same as talented. For years, I’ve struggled with the craft of baking. I’ve produced enough inedible bricks to build a small city. I’ve had the local birds turn up their beaks at the prospect of eating them—and Devon seagulls down here are notoriously voracious and unfussy eaters.
But I kept at it. And I’ve finally reached the point where my family will actually eat one of my loaves—and importantly, even cut a second slice.
Which brings me to the other, non-baking side of my life: innovation. Back in 2019, in the middle of COVID, I wrote a short piece about sliced bread and why that took off. I want to come back to it now, because there’s an idea in it that I think is really the Cinderella of innovation theory. It explains so much, and yet we keep ignoring it. It’s the idea of adoption: why people take on new things, how new things actually spread.
And right now, that matters more than ever. Look at AI. In 2025, a study from MIT found that 95% of company AI pilots were producing no measurable return—not because the technology didn’t work, but because of what researchers called a “learning gap.” This autumn 2026, PwC found over 90% of senior executives use AI at work, but fewer than 4 in 10 of their non-managerial staff do.
Now, for all the “wow,” the gee-whiz nature of the technology, adoption is still a slow and a social process. And one of the best places I know to see that in action is a loaf of bread.
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