Most successful entrepreneurs have had an "Aha!" moment where they were struck by an idea that led to their future success. From the women behind some of the most useful female items of clothing, to an Austrian man who founded a popular energy drink and the businessman behind Windows computers, here are the eureka moments of top CEOs around the world.

Born Mary Phelps Jacob in 1891, Caresse Crosby was just 19 when she got frustrated with the constrictions of her whalebone corset, so sewed together two handkerchiefs and a piece of pink ribbon to create a prototype of the modern-day bra. She was awarded the patent but sold it to Warner Brothers Corset Company, who went on to make millions. Regardless, Crosby went on to live an extravagant and sometimes scandalous lifestyle until she died in Rome, where she lived in a castle, aged 78.

Austrian businessman Dietrich Mateschitz discovered the energy drink Krating Daeng – which was invented for working-class labourers by Thai entrepreneur Chaleo Yoovidhya – while on holiday in Thailand back in the 80s. Mateschitz became a fan of the product as a hangover cure and partnered with Yoovidhya to create Red Bull to market to a global audience. Established in 1987, Red Bull sold 6.8 billion cans of the energy drink last year alone. 

Dennis "Chip" Wilson founded athletic apparel brand in 1998 after taking his first yoga class. He noticed that many of the women participating wore thin dance clothes, while men wore shrunken versions of men's t-shirts. Predicting that yoga would really take off as a form of exercise, he decided to create the perfect athletic garment for women and Lululemon was born. Wilson stepped down from the board in 2015, but is still one of the company's largest shareholders.

Born in 1926, Sweden's Ingvar Kamprad started selling matches at the age of just five before setting up IKEA – an acronym made up of his own initials and "Elmtaryd" and "Agunnaryd", where he grew up – when he was 17. IKEA successfully sold a range of items but Kamprad hit the big time in 1956, when he watched an employee remove the legs from a customer's table to fit it into their car. The idea of flat-pack furniture was born and the company has been known for it ever since. 

Read the full story of Ingvar Kamprad became a billionaire here

Sara Blakely, pictured right, was selling fax machines when she had the idea that prompted her to found shaping underwear firm Spanx. Having bought an expensive pair of white trousers, she wanted a seamless look so took a pair of tights and chopped the feet off to wear underneath. Realising that the improvised undergarment flattered and smoothed her shape, Blakely took the $5,000 (£4,650) she had in savings to create a patent and founded Spanx, now a leading underwear brand. 

10 inventors who made a fortune from just one product

Tony Hawk may be the world's most famous skateboarder but he's also a successful businessman. Hawk began skating at the age of nine and became very good at it. So when it came to going to college, he thought "Well, I’m already making money, you know? Why am I going to go pursue something else?" and stuck to skateboarding. Hawk went on to star in his own video game, among other ventures, and set up Tony Hawk Inc to oversee the various enterprises.

Flexible car-sharing service Zipcar sprung up thanks to a conversation between two stay-at-home mothers in a school playground. Antje Danielson, a Harvard geochemist, was mulling branching out of academia, while Robin Chase wanted to use her business degree. In 1999, Danielson told Chase about her car-sharing idea and they decided to pursue the idea. Both now have little to do with the business, but Zipcar has gone on to have a million members with access to more than 12,000 vehicles in nine countries. 

WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum was born in Ukraine before moving to the US as a teenager. He went on to work as a computer programmer at Yahoo! with Brian Acton, but the pair left in 2007 and spent the following year travelling. Both were also turned down for jobs by Facebook. But it was in 2009 when Koum bought an iPhone and realised the App Store was about to spawn an entire industry that was the turning point. The pair went on to develop WhatsApp which they sold for $19 billion (£16bn) to none other than Facebook in 2014. 

Jack Ma founded China's largest ecommerce company Alibaba after using the internet for the first time in Seattle in 1997. Ma was shown how to search for things online and apparently typed in the word "beer", which brought up a string of results relating to varieties from around the world. He then typed in "Chinese beer" but this brought up no results. This reportedly prompted Ma to think about starting a company specifically relating to the web and all things Chinese, and Alibaba was born.

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky came up with the idea for the accommodation-sharing website with his roommate Joe Gebbia when they struggled to pay rent on their San Francisco flat. The pair put out air mattresses on their living room floor and started to rent out the beds to conference delegates. They then teamed up with another friend, Nathan Blecharczyk, to formally found Airbnb in 2008. The site now has 150 million users across the globe. 

How Airbnb went from one bedroom to a billion-dollar company

The name Momofuku Ando may not be widely known outside Japan but he is credited for helping transform the global instant food industry. The entrepreneur was inspired to make pre-cooked instant noodles after seeing ordinary people queue for a hot bowl of the Japanese staple in post-war Osaka. He went on to found Nissin Food Products, famous for the Cup Noodle. He died 2007 aged 96 – two years after seeing his instant noodles sent into orbit on US space shuttle Discovery. 

Arianna Huffington co-founded news and commentary website the Huffington Post, now HuffPost, with former AOL executive Kenneth Lerer in 2005 after realising there was space for a liberal rival to the conservative Drudge Report site. It has since become an established news provider with editions around the world. Huffington left the site in 2016 to set up wellness brand Thrive Global after collapsing from exhaustion several years earlier.

Atlanta pharmacist Dr John S Pemberton created what became to be known as Coca-Cola in a bid to cure his morphine addiction after being injured in the US Civil War. His creation, French Wine Cola, was touted as a cure-all tonic and contained cocaine – which was removed in 1903 – and caffeine-rich kola nut extracts. Dr Pemberton sold portions of his company to various businessmen before his death in 1888, but Coca-Cola grew from strength to strength to become one of the world's biggest brands.

Toms CEO Blake Mycoskie founded his shoe business after travelling to Argentina in 2006, where he met a women working with a voluntary group distributing shoes to children. But he realised that this charitable giving model was unsustainable as children soon grew out of them. So he set up Toms and came up with the "One for One" business model, which saw his company donate a pair of shoes for every pair sold. Toms has now given away more than 86 million pairs to children in need worldwide.

World Foods founder John Mackey became inspired by the power of organic eating after dropping out of college and becoming a buyer for a vegetarian co-operative. He and his then girlfriend Renee Lawson Hardy decided to open their own natural grocery store in the ground floor of a house in Austin, Texas. The pair then teamed up with fellow store owners Craig Weller and Mark Skiles, began selling meat, beer and wine to expand their clientele, and Whole Foods Market became a resounding success.

Read more about Amazon, the company that bought Whole Foods in 2017, and its future plans here

Robin Li is the founder of China's most popular internet search engine Baidu. His inspiration can traced to his days as a school pupil, when he was obsessed with the local library, according to Bloomberg. But the local library was only open to factory workers so he had to borrow his father's ID to be able to use it. He was also said to be frustrated at the difficulty in finding the information he wanted, which later inspired him to write his own search engine.

Richard Branson was a high school dropout but went on to head up one of the world's most successful brands, Virgin Group. Branson started his first business as a teenager, went on to own a record shop, found a hugely-successful record label and the rest, as they say, is history. The brand's companies now comprise everything from healthcare to space tourism but Branson says his eureka moment was the release of Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells as the success of it taught him that it was right to take risks in order to succeed. 

Richard Branson: the billionaire entrepreneur in everything from records to rockets

Nick Woodman dreamed up the idea of the GoPro camera after a surf trip to Australia and Indonesia in 2001. He needed a camera to document his trip, and strapped one to his arm. But Woodman soon realised that he had to make the camera, its casing and the strap all in one, so knocked up a prototype using his mother's sewing machine and a drill. GoPro is now the world's leading action camera brand, selling 11 million units in 2017 alone. 

Not a vast amount is known about the notoriously reclusive chief of online gambling site Bet365, Denise Coates. What is certain is that her gamble on in-play betting markets changed the face of the bookmaking industry. In 2000, while working for her father, who ran a chain of betting shops, she setup Bet365 in a Portakabin after realising that every minute of play was a possible gambling opportunity. Coates is now worth an estimated $8.1 billion (£6.7bn), according to Forbes.

Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann came up with the idea for the virtual pinboard app while working at Google. But he wanted to build products, not just look at spreadsheets, so he quit – and then the economy collapsed. He eventually teamed up with a college friend and they built catalogue app, Tote. The pair then move on to building Pinterest, with Silbermann explaining: "I'd always thought that the things you collect say so much about who you are." The app now has 291 million monthly active users.

While fellow Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick may be more widely known, the ride-hailing app came into being thanks to a lightbulb moment by entrepreneur Garrett Camp. Camp came up with the idea after he and his pals ended up paying $800 (£660) on a private driver one New Year's Eve. Camp and two graduate school colleagues built the first version of their black-car service, UberCamp, in 2009 and brought Kalanick on board as a "mega adviser". The service launched a year later.

Martha Stewart worked as a model and stockbroker before becoming a lifestyle guru, writer and TV personality. She set up a catering company and in 1982 landed a gig at New York's Folk Art Museum. Stewart livened things up by bringing in her own chickens and hay bales in and "people went nuts over that", she later said. She realised people wanted the country brought to the city, and the city brought to the country, and eventually went on to set-up Martha Stewart Living. 

People who became millionaires in later life

Computing behemoth Microsoft was born, under the original name of Micro-soft, in 1975 after Bill Gates was shown a copy of Popular Electronics magazine by his friend Paul Allen. Inspired by the January edition featuring an Altair 8800 mini-computer kit, the pair went on to write a version of the BASIC programming language to run on the Altair and the rest is history. Later in his career, Gates turned his focus to philanthropy through the Gates Foundation after an emotional visit to a tuberculosis hospital in Africa. 

Bill Gates predicts the next 10 world-changing breakthroughs