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Robert_Unwin comments on Feed the spinoff heuristic! - Less Wrong
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Re: your examples successful spin-offs for psychology, to what extent did these therapies come out of well-established theory? Maybe someone can weigh in here. It seems possible that these are good therapies but ones that don't have a strong basis in theory (in contrast to technologies from physics or chemistry).
While cognitive-behavioral therapy could in some ways be characterized as an offshoot of the philosophy known as Stoicism (which oddly seems to have "lucked into" quite a set of effective beliefs, especially when compared to most other philosophies) rather than an offshoot of psychology, the psychological research process and psychological theory as a whole have definitely acted to inform and refine CBT.
I was looking for someone to specify a well supported psychological theory that predicts that CBT should be effective. What's the theory, and what's the evidence that people believed it before CBT came along?
I also think Shulman's example of IQ is different from the physics/chemistry case. It was discovered that scores on a short IQ test predicted long-term job performance on a range of tasks. Organizations that used IQ in hiring were then able to obtain better long-term job performance. But IQ was not something that was predicted from a model of how the brain or mind works. Even now, a century after the development of IQ tests, I'm not sure we have a good bottom up account of why a few little reasoning questions can be as informative about human cognitive performance as IQ seems to be. (Not saying that IQ gives you all the information you want, but a few short questions provide a surprising amount of information).
The issue here is that the theory that predicts that CBT should be effective is called "Stoicism" and has been around for a long while prior to the concept of a psychological research process.
If you are looking for a therapy or action that arose from psychological theory directly, I would recommend looking into the treatment of PTSD (not even recognized as a treatable condition until the 1970s) or something-- CBT has been informed and refined by the research process, but its underpinnings existed prior to the research process itself.