Serendipity in Entrepreneurship, Strategy, and Innovation—A Review and Conceptualisation

Serendipity is at the core of many innovationsInnovation, inventions, and entrepreneurial opportunities. However, despite its importance for organisations and individuals alike, research on the dimensions and antecedents of serendipity is surprisingly scarce. In this chapter, Christian Busch and Matthew Grimes review and synthesize research on serendipity in the entrepreneurshipEntrepreneurship, strategyStrategy, and innovationInnovation context, and suggest a novel conceptualisation of the processProcess of (cultivating) serendipity. They thereby provide the reader with a thorough and wide-ranging view of how serendipity has come into the fore in the field of organization and management, but also what possibilities it opens up for understanding and creating the conditionsConditions for entrepreneurial success. They advance a processProcess-oriented model of serendipity that serves as a basis to elaborate factors that increase the chancesChance for serendipitous encounters and how to capitalize on them. Amongst those, Busch and Grimes distinguish between individual (including reframing, extrovertedness and perseverance) and organizational factors (including systematic evaluations, iteration and team-based collaboration). Their paper, thereby, advances the conceptual understanding of serendipity as much as a theory of how to transfer this understanding successfully into the entrepreneurial context