It’s counterintuitive to think that a mistake could change your life—and your business—for the better, but many of America's most successful companies were born from mistakes. The University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School explored that premise recently with its first Brilliant Mistakes Contest. 

Contest judge Paul Schoemaker, author of Brilliant Mistakes: Finding Success on the Far Side of Failure, believes that businesses should throw out the conventional wisdom and look for the silver lining in mistakes. “All companies make mistakes, all people do, but from a corporate perspective, mistakes are company assets,” Schoemaker told the Wall Street Journal.

One of the contest winners, Dr. Stephen Salzman of Olive View-UCLA Medical Center, learned from a mistake when he proved that his own hypothesis on why athletes have low heart rates was completely wrong. Learning he was wrong taught him a valuable lesson that informed the rest of his career and that he now passes on to his students. "I always try to emphasize how important it is to know what you don't know," Salzman told Inc.com.

Another contest winner, Matthew Lynch of Palmetto GBA, discovered new methods of Medicare fraud when he made the mistake of looking at Medicare claims that were lower than average, rather than higher. In doing so, he changed how the industry investigates fraud. "These people had been clever enough to stay under the radar. And almost every red flag we found in that spectrum turned out to be actual fraud," he said. "If I hadn't checked, they would have gotten away with it."

“(Lynch) challenged conventional wisdom—often a whole field or culture is stuck on a wrong hypothesis,” says Schoemaker.

Wharton will continue to examine “brilliant mistakes” with a conference planned for June. Have you made a brilliant mistake? Share your story in the comments.