It is said that great Chess players can think 15-20 moves ahead. Successful entrepreneurs also think years in advance. Real estate is often considered a laggard when it comes to innovation, so adopting a forward-thinking mentality will separate you from the crowd as a leader.

Kane Kramer – MP3 Player

Kane Kramer was a British furniture salesman who invented the personal digital music player in the 1970s – a pocket-sized electronic device capable of holding up to a half an hour of stereo. Sadly, Kramer could not continue to fund the patent costs and retain the rights to the technology. His impact was massive though, with Apple pioneering their MP3 players a couple of decades later, and even crediting Kramer for his contribution.

Hedy Lamarr – Wi-Fi and Bluetooth

1930s Hollywood A-lister, Hedy Lamarr, was not your traditional silver screen starlet. As well as appearing in a number of hugely popular blockbusters during the golden age of cinema, Lamarr also developed a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes during World War II. With the help of composer, George Antheil, this unlikely duo used spread spectrum and frequency hopping technology to defeat the threat of radio jams caused by opposing forces. The technology pioneered by Lamarr formed the foundation of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

Charles Babbage – Computer

More than 100 years before the first computer was built, English mathematician, Charles Babbage, designed the programmable general-purpose computer in 1837. Known as the analytical engine, the computer was complete with an arithmetical unit, control flow loops, and memory.

Although Babbage ran out of money and could not complete his computer, his designs and concepts were tested in 1991 and the results indicated the analytical engine would have been successful. The incomplete mechanisms of Babbage’s machine can be found today in the London Science Museum.

Jonas Hanway – Umbrellas in Britain

In the 1750s, Jonas Hanway left France with a new umbrella. When he arrived in Britain, he was continuously booed, some people even “pelt(ing) him with rubbish”. Why? At the time, the British thought that umbrellas synonymous with French people. Sure, umbrellas had existed in some form for thousands of years, but they didn’t really catch on until France made them more convenient in the early 18th century. So to England, umbrellas became a symbol of Frenchness, an enemy at the time.

Rene Descartes – Contact lenses

Although primarily recognised as a philosopher, Rene Descartes did like to dabble in the physical sciences as well from time to time. Having taken inspiration from Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex of the eye, Manual D in 1508; Descartes proposed a seeing aid made up of a glass tube filled with liquid placed directly on the cornea.

The protruding end of the contact lens was then shaped to correct a person’s sight, granting them 20:20 vision. Unfortunately, Descartes’ lenses also made it impossible to blink, so they never really took off. But this idea was not too dissimilar from Adolf Fick’s contact lens, the first version of the invention to successfully fit in a person’s eye – created more than 250 years after Descartes’ attempt.