[teleforce]

Contrary to popular belief problems solved in unrelated domains are very common in invention and innovation but people just hate to admit them, hopefully in the near future someone can honestly write a book on it.

One of the most prolific scientists Albert Einstein had his single most productive year while working as a patent officer (Annus Mirabilis). I strongly suspect that he learned quite a lot from many patent applications, journal papers and books that he was required to read during his daily job, thus getting excellent and novel ideas from seemingly unrelated patents and discoveries.

The classic modern example (sorry for the oxymoron terminology) is how a patented signal processing technique of radio astronomy research by CSIRO solved the wireless multi-path propagation problem that enabled wireless revolution from WiFi to 4G/5G.

CSIRO's patent leads to the wireless OFDM invention that allows for much higher communication bandwidth especially on wireless environment where unmitigated multi-path interference is a deal breaker. But of course wireless people just hate to admit it [1].

[1]https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/04/how-the-aussie-g...