One out of many examples is Donald Glaser's invention of the bubble chamber to detect elementary particles for which he received the 1960 Nobel Prize in physics. He tells the story how he got the main idea for his invention while he was watching how bubbles formed when he opened a bottle of beer. Of course most people could watch bubbles forming in beer bottles for a lifetime without inventing any new device. But in a way Glaser's brain was prepared for this discovery for two reasons: He was working on the problem of visualizing tracks of elementary particles and he had detailed experience in working with Wilson cloud chambers. The working principle of a cloud chamber is in a way opposite to that of a bubble chamber but the mechanisms of both devices are closely correlated.
During the fifties the elementary particle physics environment has changed by introducing more and more powerful particle accelerators, which required larger and larger cloud chambers to detect the traces of the reacting particles. It became clear that a continuous increase in the performance of the cloud chamber (by increasing their size) was not a sustainable strategy once they would reach a size of tens ore even hundreds of meters in diameter. Thus there existed a large "evolutionary pressure" for the elementary particle physics community to come up with a qualitatively new concept, an innovation to solve the urgent problem.
Glaser's innovation started a new period of continuous improvement with a corresponding growth in size and mechanical complexity of bubble chambers. As a student in 1975 I worked on the Big European Bubble Chamber (BEBC) probably the climax of that evolutionary branch. The sheer amount of the highly flammable liquid hydrogen (BEBC had reached the size of a comfortable living room) created enormous technical problems. This went all the way to the need for a hot line to the local airport to warn pilots in the case the hydrogen had to be released into the air. This size problem and especially the inflation of the number of tracks that needed to be analyzed built up the evolutionary pressure again until it was resolved with the invention of the electronic Charpak chamber, another innovation that was awarded a Nobel prize.
This example illustrates the progression as an alternation of continuous improvement and intermittent innovations. The time-scales associated with both processes typically are quite different.