Serendipity Innovation - A Mysterious Organizational Strategy?

In organizations, while incremental innovations may emerge with daily practices and continuous efforts for improving products, big innovations that lead to influential competitive advantage do not come out easily. Legendarily, last century has witnessed some great innovation breakthroughs that happened not by planning but serendipity. Those mysterious stories raise curiosity of organizations: Is serendipity a short cut for organizations to achieve influential innovative results? Under what circumstances, is it possible to stimulate more serendipity events in organizations? In the academic field, systematic analyses of serendipity in organizations are scarce, and articles on serendipity in organizational contexts tend to be literature based. To bridge the gap, the study dived into serendipity innovation cases inside an organization by conducting interviews with people who are involved. Through exploring how serendipity innovation, as one among other innovations in the organization, happens, the study proposes serendipity-enabling innovation strategies to organizations. The study not only uncovers a matrix view of possible enablers for serendipity innovation based on timeline and categories, but also identifies a set of main challenges that may kill serendipity innovation along the process. Besides, there is one new finding that challenges the existing definition and explanation of serendipity. It is a serendipity discovery for the researcher since this finding is not expected according to the research objective. Strategically, the researcher proposes that managers should first have a correct understanding of serendipity innovation, as one innovation strategy besides others. Instead of pushing hard to drive serendipity to happen in the innovation process, managers shall take the stand - as long as capability from individual level to organizational level is developed, serendipity innovation would happen, and great opportunities would not be killed in the process. Managers should guide teams with other innovation strategies to welcome serendipity innovation so that when serendipity happens, those teams can enable it with right knowhow