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Harvard Business Review

To Drive Innovation, Create the Conditions for Serendipity

Since the late 1990s, more than 30 million people have benefited from a corrective eye surgery procedure called LASIK. Before the advent of LASIK, surgeons used a scalpel to cut into the cornea. Then, they reshaped it to improve a patient's vision. This caused a lot of damage to surrounding eye tissues. Instead of a scalpel, LASIK uses a femtosecond laser, which emits powerful pulses of light for only a femtosecond (one quadrillionth of a second). Surgeons can make very precise cuts that do not cause any collateral damage. The basic technology, known as Chirped Pulse Amplification (CPA), was developed in the mid-1980s by the French physicist Gerard Mourout, earning him the 2018 Nobel Prize in physics together with Donna Strickland. But the idea of applying CPA-generated femtosecond lasers to ophthalmology was entirely serendipitous. Not quite coincidence but usually unintended, serendipity involves what Robert K. Merton describes as 'making discoveries, by accidents or sagacity, of things (someone was) not in quest of.' Serendipity Is a Three-Step Process While it is sometimes confused with luck, serendipity is a process that involves three steps. Let's look at how it worked in the case of LASIK: 1. An unexpected event happens. In 1993, several graduate students were working in Mourou's lab at the University of Michigan. Detao Du was one of them. One evening, he forgot to put on his safety glasses while he was adjusting the mirrors of a femtosecond laser. One of his eyes was accidentally hit by the beam of the laser. Du was immediately taken to the hospital to make sure his eye had not been damaged. 2. Someone sees value in the unexpected event. Once in the hospital, Du was examined by Ron Kurtz, the ophthalmologist on duty. While there was no damage to his eye, Kurtz noticed several unusual burns in his retina. As he recalls: ' When we dilated his eye, what I saw was… retinal burns in the very center of his retina. But these were unique in that they were very small and very precise. I was curious as to what kind of laser this was and learned what a femtosecond laser was.' 3. Someone leverages the serendipitous opportunity. Shortly after examining Du, Kurtz met with Mourou. He joined his team and started to work on potential applications of femtosecond lasers in ophthalmology. One year later, Kurtz and Du presented their findings at an academic conference. Tibor Juhasz was one of the attendants. At the time, he was consulting for a company that was exploring the use of picosecond (one trillionth of a second) lasers for eye surgery. The technology did not function properly. Because the pulses were too long, they inflicted a lot of damage to eye tissues. Juhasz immediately saw the potential of femtosecond lasers. As he recalls: ' Ron (Kurtz) gave a talk about his findings with femtosecond laser pulses … showing that everything that was the problem with picoseconds can be overcome using femtoseconds.' After the conference, Mourou asked Juhasz to join his team. He also convinced the University of Michigan, the NIH, and the NSF to provide additional funding. Together with Kurtz, Juhasz founded the company that launched the first femtosecond laser for ophthalmology in 2001. Juhasz recalls the early days of the startup: 'People in the industry were initially very skeptical that the concept would work.' But his persistence paid off. In 2007, the business was sold to a medical optics company for more than $ 800 million. Today, it belongs to Johnson & Johnson Vision. And the story didn't end there. After working on corrective eye surgery, Kurtz and Juhasz developed a femtosecond laser-based procedure for cataract surgery. More recently, Juhasz has created a new startup that uses the same technology to treat glaucoma. How Can Companies Leverage Serendipity? Serendipity is a concept that has been around for hundreds of years. It has led to many scientific breakthroughs. For instance, Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin while doing research on influenza. Pfizer scientists found a treatment for erectile dysfunction while developing a blood pressure drug. But unlike scientists, business leaders and managers are often reluctant to embrace serendipity. To some extent, this is understandable. Serendipity is unpredictable and companies cannot entirely depend on it to innovate. Companies are also very different from universities. Their raison d'être is not to advance science, but to be profitable and grow. Nonetheless, we believe that more businesses could benefit from more doses of serendipity. Here are three science-inspired strategies that business leaders can use to better leverage it: 1. Encourage openness to surprises. A hallmark of scientists is their openness to surprises. In the femtosecond laser story, Kurtz was immediately intrigued by the unusual burns he saw on Du's retina. He was also curious to understand where they came from. Some managers have a similar ability to make sense of the unexpected. In the early 1970s, Bernard Sadow was returning from a holiday in the Caribbean. While waiting in the airport's customs transfer area, he saw an employee pushing a heavy machine on a wheeled skid. He looked at his heavy suitcases and thought: 'Now that's what we need: wheels on luggage.' And just like that, the rolling suitcase was born. In the business world, managers overlook surprises because they are too focused on day-to-day operations. When Sadow came up with the idea for the rolling suitcase, he was working at a luggage company. Had he been on a business trip rather than on holiday, he would have likely been too busy to notice the airport employee maneuvering the heavy machine and to make the connection that inspired the rolling suitcase. To foster openness to surprises, business leaders should regularly invite their team members to share the unexpected observations they've made. At first, they are likely to be skeptical. Once they begin tracking anomalies however, their ability to spot them will improve. When people know they're expected to notice the unexpected, they become more receptive and attentive to it. Over time, building this habit will strengthen a company's ability to recognize and act on unforeseen opportunities. Haier is a case in point. In the 1990s, Chinese farmers were repeatedly contacting Haier's maintenance service to complain that their washing machines kept breaking down. The service team soon discovered that the farmers were using them to wash potatoes before selling them at local markets. Instead of dismissing the complaints, Haier saw an opportunity and eventually developed an entirely new range of potato-washing machines. 2. Foster cross-disciplinary interactions. Cross-disciplinary interaction lies at the heart of serendipity. When individuals with diverse backgrounds and skills come together, the exchange of perspectives can spark unexpected connections and lead to new opportunities. In 2022, all the main protagonists of the femtosecond laser story (Mourou, Strickland, Kurtz, Juhasz, and Du) received the Golden Goose Award. This prize honors scientists whose federally funded research has led to unexpected innovations with a significant impact on society. Without the combined expertise of physicists and ophthalmologists, there would have been no femtosecond laser eye surgery. Physicists had searched for practical applications of femtosecond lasers, but they couldn't come up with an innovative idea. Within companies, employees with diverse areas of expertise are often spread across different departments. This makes cross-disciplinary collaboration unlikely to happen naturally. To make spontaneous interactions a part of employees' daily routines, companies should design spaces that make it easy for them to connect. Steve Jobs, Apple's famous co-founder, argued, in connection with his design choices for Pixar's headquarters, that: 'There's a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat—that's crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they're doing, you say 'Wow,' and soon you're cooking up all sorts of ideas.' Following his lead, many companies have designed their headquarters to encourage serendipitous interactions. A standout example is Nvidia, whose Endeavor (2018) and Voyager (2022) buildings in Santa Clara have been described as a 'Mecca of physical meet-ups.' With their open catwalks, central plazas, and terraced platforms, they are structured to encourage chance encounters and spontaneous collaboration. In an office setting, connections between employees from diverse backgrounds often form naturally through casual conversations and spontaneous interactions. In hybrid or remote environments, however, informal cross-team exchanges are far less common. That's why it is essential for managers to encourage cross-disciplinary collaboration. This can take various forms. For instance, employees may be invited to join another team's meetings to share insights or offer feedback. Alternatively, they could be asked to lead a session with a different team to bring a fresh perspective. Managers may also form cross-functional teams to enable collaboration on short-term projects. Companies should also tap into the potential of external professional networks. This means encouraging employees to engage with industry associations and sponsoring their participation in conferences, even those outside their direct field. Maintaining connections with former employees through alumni networks can also be a valuable source of unexpected insights and opportunities. 3. Make experimentation an integral part of the culture. Experiments play a crucial role in science. They also drive major innovations in business. For instance, the inkjet printer originated from a failed experiment. In the late 1970s, Canon was exploring new printing technologies. The Japanese company identified inkjet printing as a particularly promising avenue and assembled a small team to work on this new technology. During one experiment, an employee accidentally touched the tip of an ink-filled syringe with a hot soldering iron. Much to his surprise, the heat caused the ink to spray out of the needle. He immediately realized that heat—rather than pressure—could be used to trigger the spray of ink. Companies are more likely to discover serendipitous opportunities when they empower employees to run small-scale experiments. While some of these experiments will fail, that doesn't mean they are worthless. What appears to be failure may be a first step toward an unexpected breakthrough. In a business context however, experimentation can only thrive with strong backing from top executives. They must champion it and acknowledge its role in driving innovation and success. Otherwise, employees are unlikely to risk running experiments that may eventually fail. Canon's leadership gave the inkjet printing team the freedom to experiment. Although the inkjet printer as we know it began as a fortunate accident, it earned leadership support as soon as its potential became clear. Without that backing, one of the company's most iconic products might never have existed. . . . While serendipity is highly valued in science, it is often overlooked or mistaken for luck in business. As a result, many managers don't open themselves up to its possibilities. That's a pity because it suggests that they may be missing out on a great many opportunities.