Cultivating Serendipity

By -
Source: Make Serendipity Work for You- HBR

  1. Serendipity is a close relative of creativity, which means that it is a capability that can be cultivated, bought and sold.
  2. Serendipity benefits not just from scarcity (forcing people to be creative) but from a degree of sloppiness, tenacity, and dissent. Attempts to dictate serendipity are stifling and impractical.
  3. History matters. Innovation is as much about looking at the past as it is about anticipating the future. It can mean pairing today's observation with those made previously, and often in quite different contexts, as did Pfizer scientists in linking side-effects from clinical trials to a PhD dissertation completed at the University of California, as well as two medical articles published several years before.
  4. Socializing matters. It is very unlikely that James Watson and Francis Crick would have been as efficient in elucidating the structure of DNA without the benefit of those they shared their offices and interest with.
  5. Diversity matters. As John Stuart Mill foresaw: "It is hardly possible to overrate the value...of placing human beings in contact with persons dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar...Such communication has always been, and is peculiarly in the present age, one of the primary sources of progress".
  6. Tinkering matters. Occasionally, it pays to turn a blind eye when seeing co-workers tinker with company resources for things they care about personally. Watson and Crick did. The DNA molecule was never their "official" project.




 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Few thoughts on New York Times article

By -
Brilliant article in New York times today: From 'End of History' Author, a Look at the Beginning and Middle Key points I found interesting : Institutions are the rules that coordinate social behavior. Without taking human behavior in account you misunderstand the nature of political institutions. Such behavior especially the faculty for creating rules are the basis for social institutions, even though the content of institutions is supplied by culture.   My take: This at a wider level relates to the three most important institutions in the 21 st   century; Religion, Financial system & Democracy. Same principle can be applied to the evolution of language.     Societies are not trapped by their past nor are they free in any given generation to remake themselves. Building institutions is as difficult as changing them. Poor countries remain poor because of the absence of a strong law.   My take: Even though we continue to criticize our system, what we must underst
Read more

Notes on – Demo conference

By -
Source: Meet Google's human search engine for innovation and www.demo.com There are several levels when we see companies: As partners – can they build applications on our platform & make the platform more valuable. Business development or licensing type of deal Acquisition Ventures – Find companies to invest in The sweet spot is mobile, location based services, social & e-commerce. " IBM, Digital, Sun, Apollo and Microsoft had their time. Now cloud based systems like Google, Facebook & others will have their time. It's a natural progression of business. Microsoft had a hell of run for 30 years. They're still a very powerful company. Very profitable, growing very well. So I wouldn't say they're going to go down; I would say the market has moved. " I think Kinect is a game changer and probably the most important hardware innovation of the decade. " Tablets are for consumption not for creation . " Agree but not entirely tr
Read more

On Digital Marketing

By -
Being in digital marketing for the last 10 years, I get a lot of queries from fresh graduates on how to start their career in this domain. This post is for them. This is how I think about digital marketing.  The first step is to understand that digital marketing is not a radically new discipline but an extension of traditional marketing. The goal of marketing is to connect the sellers with the buyers and provide value to the buyer whilst making a profit for the seller. There are two major differences in traditional marketing(TM) and digital marketing(DM). 1. Reach 2. ROI With digital you can reach only a small % of the overall population as not everyone is on digital mediums viz. online, mobile & social networks.  For e.g. internet penetration in India is only 26%. So, if your Target Audience is digital only then can you expect to reach them via DM. To reach others you will need to use the traditional channels such as radio or TV. Measuring ROI is much simpler in d
Read more