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The business of holidays

Physics World August 2021

Physics World

 
Comment: Transactions Physics World  August 2021

The business of holidays

Can a holiday make you money? James McKenzie explains how business ideas – both big and small – often arise when you’re away on vacation

Dream into action James McKenzie was inspired to found a business selling therapeutic lighting after being wowed by the sunrise on a holiday in Thailand. (Courtesy: iStock/GOLF3530)

It’s not been a great year for holidays. Coronavirus restrictions mean you can’t just book tickets and jet off to your chosen beach or city destination – there are quarantine arrangements, lateral-flow tests and jabs to consider. Still, this month’s special issue of Physics World has got me thinking about why a break from the daily grind can be so important to get your creative juices flowing. And that’s just as true for academics as for those, like me, who work in industry.

According to a survey of 1000 small business owners by Sandler Training (UK) in 2014, nearly one in five (19%) of those who have been successfully trading for more than five years claim they dreamt up their business idea while on vacation. I’m not saying you should spend your valuable holiday time glued to your laptop doing market research. No, the trick is to let your mind wander. Daydreaming can let you “think outside the box” or have a “Eureka!” moment – and then explore it.

In the travel sector, perhaps the most famous example occurred when Maureen and Tony Wheeler (an engineering graduate) embarked on a journey in an old banger from Europe to Australia for their honeymoon in the early 1970s (hitching a lift on a yacht for the final leg). The couple decided to share their travel tips in a book, later called Across Asia on the Cheap. It was the start of the Lonely Planet travel-publishing empire, which has so far sold more than 145 million guidebooks. 

Other successful businesses that started on holiday include the file-hosting service Dropbox. It was dreamt up in 2005 by Drew Houston, a former computer-science student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was travelling on a bus from New York to Boston. Frustrated he’d left his USB memory stick at home yet again, Houston recalled in a 2017 interview with Business Insider how he just decided to open his laptop and start writing code that let him store and share files. The company now has a $10bn valuation. 

Then there’s the photo- and video-sharing app Instagram, which occurred to Kevin Systrom in 2010 while strolling on a beach in Baja California, Mexico. Having studied engineering and management science at Stanford University, Systrom had been developing a prototype app called Burbn. But when his fiancée Nicole said she’d never use it as images taken with her iPhone 4 camera didn’t look great, Systrom decided to add filters that could enhance the quality of the pictures. Renaming it Instagram, the company was snapped up by Facebook for $1bn two years later.

Perchance to dream

I sadly haven’t got a multi-billion-dollar business to my name, but some of my best ideas have occurred while away from the day-to-day grind, when my mind has time and space to explore ideas. I remember once returning to Heathrow airport after a business trip to the US and heading straight on to Thailand, where I’d booked a fly-and-flop beach holiday. At the time I was working for an optical-instrumentation company, which meant I had my laptop and a small spectrometer with me.

On my first morning in Thailand, jetlag woke me before sunrise. Feeling restless, I decided to fire up the spectrometer and measure the spectral characteristics of the Sun from my balcony. After recording data for a couple of days, I realized how much I liked the bright light in Thailand and began to wonder why I (and others too) couldn’t have it in gloomy old Britain. The idea spawned a business selling light-emitting diodes (LEDs) that emit “circadian” light.

These devices mimic the spectral content of the Sun by being bright and having lots of blue during the day, while transitioning smoothly to a dimmer, candle-like glow with lots of red at night. Our lighting products were mostly sold to hospitals and care homes, who used them to shorten patients’ recovery times and boost the well-being of long-term residents. I even installed them in my house, which magically took me back to Thailand whenever I turned them on..

The big picture

Sometimes, though, a good holiday isn’t about developing a new business idea – but getting a sense of perspective about what’s truly important in life. That was certainly the case on my last “proper” holiday, when my wife and I were driving from Spain, up into France and then down through Italy. Realizing we’d be passing near the huge ITER experimental thermonuclear fusion reactor, which is being built north of Marseille, I decided to call them up from the car and see if I could drop in.

Casually mentioning my links to the Institute of Physics, I managed to bag a last-minute tour of the construction site the following day. The visit gave me a chance to see in the flesh this inspirational, international megaproject, which will harness the power of the stars to produce green and carbon-free energy – surely one of the last great problems humanity needs to solve. I didn’t get any new ideas on that occasion, but you never know what a break can do.

Take the Scottish microbiologist Alexander Fleming, who in 1928 famously left a sample of inoculated Staphylococcus bacteria on culture plates in his lab before heading off on holiday with his family to his Suffolk country home. Returning a few weeks later, Fleming saw that one culture was contaminated with a fungus that had destroyed nearby colonies of bacteria but left those further away untouched. The mould was from the genus Penicillium, which can be used to make penicillin – the first and most famous antibiotic. Simply by being on holiday, Fleming had stumbled across a world-changing discovery.

So for anyone who thinks they’re too busy to go on holiday or it’s waste of time – remember that a change can be as good as a rest.