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The Three Components of Serendipity
Have a prepared mind, be ready to
get inspired by anything and any
time.
Observe and notice usual and unusual
things with an open mind and new
eyes.
Be passionate about creating
innovative and valuable connections.
Tips for Developing Serendipity
Adopt an attitude of a Loving
Creator, keep your mind open, and be
prepared to discover entrepreneurial
opportunities for value innovation
any time and everywhere.
Search for inspiration and
entrepreneurial opportunities always
and everywhere – and inspiration and
entrepreneurial opportunities will
search for you.
Remember, nothing makes you blinder
than a point of view. Learn to
unlearn. You need to look at the
things inside and outside you with
new eyes if you want to make
discoveries.
When an experiment doesn't produce
an expected result, don't discard it
outright. Refresh your curiosity and
experiment with the unexpected
outcome to see what comes out of it.
In partnership negotiations, expect
to discover unexpected advantages or
benefits incurred due to positive
synergy effects of the alliance.
***
SERENDIPITY: 8 TIPS
Have your mind prepared for
learning, new insights and thinking
outside the box. Be creatively
dissatisfied and expect to make an
accidental discovery any moment.
Be observant. Keep your eyes and
mind open at all times. Look at
everything around you as doors to
inspiration and new discoveries.
Be passionate about making
innovative and valuable connections.
Motivate yourself to look for and
notice unanticipated and unsought
until it becomes a habit.
Curiously notice outside-the-box
remarks of outsiders who look at the
things that are usual to you with
new eyes.
Be sagacious enough to link together
apparently innocuous facts in order
to gain a breakthrough insight and
discover serendipitous value.
Create knowledge not by processing
information but rather by
cross-pollinating ideas, subjective
insights, intuitions, and hunches.
Develop a subconscious ability and
habit to connect randomly picked
things, solutions, words, thoughts
or ideas in an unusual, meaningful
and synergistic way.
Silence your thinking mind and let
the guidance from the subconscious
and intuitive mind instead of the
thinking mind bring you to the state
of afflatus, enlightenment and
comprehension.
***
Design
for Stimulating and Supporting
Serendipity
***
by
Others
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10 Examples of Serendipity in Social
Business
One of
the main reasons for an enterprise
to embrace internal transparency and
social collaboration tools is to
create an environment where
serendipity happens on a regular
basis.
Serendipity means a fortunate
happenstance or a pleasant surprise.
It is an event that happens
unexpectedly. Perhaps the most
famous instance of serendipity is
the discovery of penicillin through
accidental contamination of
laboratory samples.
In the context of social
collaboration, serendipity means
that you receive unexpected help or
information, often from a person you
did not know had expertise in the
subject.
***
SERENDIPITY
erendipity – others call it luck or
Divine Intervention – means a
“fortunate happenstance” or
“pleasant surprise”.
It was coined by Horace Walpole in
1754.
In a letter, he wrote to a friend
explaining an unexpected discovery
he had made by reference to a
Persian fairy tale, The Three
Princes of Serendipity.
The princes, he told his
correspondent, were “always making
discoveries, by accidents and
sagacity, of things that they were
not in quest of”.
To
mention a few, Archimedes, Newton,
Marie Curie, Velcro, Super Glue, and
Post-it Note and many other
discoveries.
Serendipity had a role to play in
all the accomplishments of those
businesses, inventions, and
endeavors.
What I had in common with these
people was the wish to do something,
and the perseverance to pursue the
lightbulb-idea to discover some
opportunities.
Examples of serendipity in business
Serendipitous experiences are vital
both in the creative and business
realms.
According to James Heaton;
Serendipity is a combination of
things: actively setting up
opportunities, a willingness to go
with the flow of events, the ability
to see the thing that arises by
chance, and finally, being ready to
seize the opportunity—prepared both
in the sense of being open to the
possibility and ready to take
advantage of it.
Serendipity is a significant factor
in both the creative process and the
business process
These are valuable ideas to anyone
in business.
If I look at how companies are
linked up in a cycle of sellers,
employees, customers—they all have
this one thing in common:
They all emanated from some linkages
of random, circumstantial
connections that led to the
formation of an event.
Serendipity has occurred to me in
many circumstances and I have
developed a particular kind of faith
in it. And when serendipity occurs,
there is some unexplainable and
uncontrollable flow of events.
I can certainly learn that
serendipity happens as it did the
way I started and developed my
business.
My
“luck” happened on the Internet. I
started in a chatroom, then used all
serendipity engines like Linkedin,
blogging, websites, chatrooms.
I am not a great blogger, but 100%
of my business was forged through
social media.
By networking, joining online
groups, sharing my thoughts and
ideas, my serendipitous moments had
started to unfold.
Through social media management, the
rate of meeting the right people at
the right time and place occurred.
Facilitating or inducing Serendipity
using Social Media
In facilitating serendipity through
social media, the posts, blogs, or
content must be goal-directed.
The goal is to meet people and
create synergistic relationships
that may lead to the fulfillment of
your vision.
With the well-written materials,
appropriate keywords, and with the
utilization of search engine
optimization (SEO) to increase your
post’s or blog’s searchability, the
possibility of chance encounters is
higher.
By focusing on your target
audience’s interests, giving them
some inspirational posts,
problem-solving blogs, and helpful
tips, there is a greater chance of
encountering like-minded people.
THESIS
Entrepreneurial serendipity is often
the reason behind a new business and
a driving force of the process of
growth of an opportunity-driven
firm.
Entrepreneurial serendipity is
taught at the Innompic University (Innompirsity).
Entrepreneurial serendipity contests
were pionered at 5th World Innompic
Games 2021.
This thesis investigates the role of
serendipity, effectuation, and
entrepreneurial marketing
in fast-growth entrepreneurial
firms. Using a qualitative paradigm,
multiple case studies and
cross-country approaches, the study
aims to explore the
interrelationships among these
constructs
and answer the main research
question relating to their
contribution to fast growth.
“Entrepreneurial Serendipity” as
another distinctive pattern in
entrepreneurship, whereby
entrepreneurs look for any
opportunity to start a business and
explore an appropriate opportunity
that comes along. Further analyses
illustrate that entrepreneurs
believe in the occurrence of
serendipity in their day-to-day
business; however, it indirectly
contributes to fast growth
mediated by two important elements:
effectual thinking and
entrepreneurial marketing.
serendipity, that is, elements of
chance that may profoundly
alter a firm’s growth path. For
small firms, reaction to specific
opportunities may be a
crucial competitive advantage,
Using new discoveries in science as
an analogy for new opportunities in
entrepreneurship
may help researchers to consider the
concept of serendipity in
entrepreneurship. Since the new
definitions of entrepreneurship and
entrepreneurial firms are built upon
exploring new
opportunities (Shane & Venkataraman,
2000), new firms are the artefacts,
or tools, that
entrepreneurs use to exploit new
opportunities or build new markets,
sometimes in a serendipitous manner.
The occurrence of serendipity is
just one part of the story. The
ability to realise that
serendipity has happened is another
and maybe the crucial part. Before
Isaac Newton’s discovery,
many people would have seen things
fall, but his special knowledge and
ability to recognise
serendipity in the moment helped him
to think about the force behind the
fall – the gravity.
Similarly, serendipity can help
entrepreneurs to see desired and
undesired opportunities, but they
need special abilities to realise
and use it. Alertness, networks,
knowledge and
experience are some elements that
may help them to recognise and
explore a serendipitous
moment, and exploit the opportunity
effectuatively (Sarasvathy, 2001,
2008).
This study investigates the effects
of two concepts, effectuation and
entrepreneurial
marketing (EM), on the exploitation
of new opportunities. Effectuation
is the predominant logic
of exploiting new opportunities in
entrepreneurial firms (Sarasvathy,
2001, 2008). This logic
assists entrepreneurs to exploit new
opportunities with their available
means and create a number
of possible goals. Effectuation
could also be the logic to exploit
serendipitous opportunities
(Sarasvathy, 2001). Since marketing
knowledge and ability are important
skills for entrepreneurs
to have in order to recognise and
use new opportunities (Carson &
Gilmore, 2000a; Shane, 2000),
and marketing in entrepreneurial
firms is effectuative and interwoven
with effectuation logic
(Hills & Hultman, 2011a),
effectuation logic and
entrepreneurial marketing can be
seen as
strategies to exploit new
opportunities in the marketplace.
Thus, this thesis conceptualises the
role of accidental opportunity
exploration (through
luck, chance, fate, fortune, etc.)
in serendipity and discusses how
serendipity influences
opportunity exploration in
entrepreneurship and how it affects
the growth of the firms. We further
conceptualise the ability of
entrepreneurs to explore
serendipitous opportunities and
exploit them
through effectuation logic and
entrepreneurial marketing, and
develop a model that shows a
trajectory to fast growth in
entrepreneurial firms. Therefore,
the purpose of the present study is
to
explore how entrepreneurial firms
achieve fast growth by investigating
the influence of
serendipity, effectuation logic, and
entrepreneurial marketing on that
growth. Exploring these
three factors will potentially shed
some light on understanding how
firms exploit new
opportunities that lead to intended
(or unintended) growth.
Thus, the main research question is:
RQ: How do serendipity, effectuation
logic, and entrepreneurial marketing
affect
fast growth in entrepreneurial
firms?
In order to address the main
question, the investigation will be
guided by the following
questions:
RQ1: How does serendipity manifest
in entrepreneurial opportunity
exploration and
how does it affect a firm’s fast
growth?
RQ2: How do entrepreneurs use
effectual reasoning in relation to a
firm’s fast
growth?
RQ3: How do entrepreneurs use
entrepreneurial marketing in
relation to a firm’s
fast growth?
RQ4: What are the interrelationships
between serendipity, effectuation,
and EM in
fast-growth firms? |
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