The Science of Serendipity How to Unlock the Promise of Innovation

Innovation is top of the agenda for most CEO's. There are very few organisations that can claim the innovation crown and the plethora of pundits have muddied the waters with endless dull academic texts. The central thesis is that large organizations, while excelling at 'rational management' are poor at reacting to the unexpected and deliberately injecting the unfamiliar. But it's an often proved fact that most successful innovations come about through serendipity, and it's the companies that are able to react to serendipitous events that are often the most successful. Recognising what no one else has seen, connecting the dots and having the perseverance to drive an idea all the way to commercial success underpins corporate innovation, but is one of the biggest challenges of big business. The combination of reassuring logic (or rigour) with the seeming instability of 'shaking it up' that underpins corporate innovation. Almost all company execs know that combination of the seemingly opposing forces of reassuring logic (or rigour) with the instability of 'shaking it up' is critical, and yet very few can articulate it and even fewer harness it. So the critical question for those determined to grow through innovation (possibly every company in the West or more developed markets in the East) is how this blend is practically achieved. Listening to successful innovators tell their story is instructive. Many would like to paint a picture of how they planned it all, thought it through and diligently executed. But in reality innovation stories are a glorious mix of method and madness, yes we planned and worked hard but the real magic came from chance encounters, from things that went wrong, from happy accidents serendipity. The natural tendency for organizations to get a grip on their processes, to standardize many activities, to recruit steady hands all of this is understandable. But it's also fatal. Innovation has no chance here. This book explores the reality of how organizations get messy, how they allow the madness, the unfamiliar, even the threatening to enter the gates. In the same way as Sticky Wisdom, this book will include a lot of practical advice alongside the theory, including learning summaries, activities to do and top tip checklists. It will clearly lay out a series of tried and tested organizational design and career development solutions. Like 'planning spontaneity', 'designing serendipity' doesn't make literal sense and yet we've seen over and over that it is possible, and in very measured organisations, to deliberately create the conditions for happy accidents to occur and critically that this seeming madness blends perfectly with method.

Matt Kingdo, has been at the front line of innovation for more than 20 years. ?What If!, the company he co-founded, partners with the world's most successful, forward-looking companies to galvanise innovation and deliver impact. In plain English, Kingdon tells the stories of companies grappling with innovation at scale, how they've succeeded or struggled, and what this can teach ambitious, frustrated corporate executives.