Back in the ’70s, Scott Burnham was a technician working for a company that made guitar cables and accessories. While soldering parts one day, he accidentally attached the wrong resistor to a circuit board. It was a fortunate error, because the circuit suddenly produced a haunting moan — so lovely and eerie that Burnham realized it would make a fantastic ­guitar-pedal sound. He created the Rat, a pedal that quickly sold tens of thousands of units. Bands from Nirvana to Radiohead used it, and musicians I know today still swear by it.

This is the type of story that crops up a lot in Pagan Kennedy’s new book, “Inventology: How We Dream Up Things That Change the World.” After talking to dozens of inventors, she finds that their breakthroughs frequently involve an element of luck — though, as Louis Pasteur observed, luck favors the prepared mind. Burnham, after all, was an expert in his field, and had been planning for some time to create a new distortion pedal. His expertise and passion helped him recognize the happiness in the happy accident. You or I might have winced at the circuit’s weird sound; Burnham heard the future of rock guitar.

How precisely does one become more creative? This is a perpetual anxiety in the C Suite, where executives lunge at advice that promises to open up their Steve Jobsian third eye. Kennedy’s book and Adam Grant’s latest, “Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World,” try to demystify creativity, via the genre’s now traditional counterpoint of inspirational stories and counterintuitive social science. If clumsily constructed, this type of book can become self-parodic, a ­PowerPoint slog through the Five Things You Need to Do to Become More Dynamic and Creative.

Kennedy largely avoids this trap, with a boost from elegant prose and excellent reporting, including material from her former contributions to The New York Times Magazine’s “Who Made That?” column. She generally avoids the pundit’s temptation to coin trademark phrases, though she comes up with one terrific one: “Martian jet lag,” to describe the case of inventors who suffer from a problem years before other people do — and spy an opportunity.