design innovation

Innovation Through Serendipity

March 1, 2020 Design

There’s a well-known ‘eureka’ story around the occurrence of ‘serendipity’ or an unplanned discovery. Hiero the monarch of Syracuse, gave a silversmith some silver and gold to make him a crown but the king wasn’t convinced if the silversmith had been an honest craftsman. So he commissioned the famous mathematician Archimedes to check if the silversmith was a fraud or otherwise. He failed to find a solution, but one day as Archimedes was taking a bath and as he settled in the bathtub he noticed some of the water overflowed. He found out that it was the exact amount of weight that occupied his body. That’s how the Archimedes’ principle came into being and humans found a way to keep giant cargo ships floating on the deep oceans.

The definition of Serendipity, in a nutshell, is a happy coincidence, an unexpected event that apparently occurs due to chance, and it often happens when we are searching for something else. Once can be assured that almost everybody in the corporate world might hate to leave things to chance but in especially design as a field it’s mostly common to expect serendipity to occur with or without due process and provided the outcome isn’t driven by expectations alone.

But it has also been mentioned that serendipity isn’t an act of coincidence alone. Rather, in innovative processes, serendipity is more about making “connections or insights that occur when we are searching for one thing to find something else.” So effectively, being serendipitous means discovering what we didn’t know, 1 and Apple is one company. that is notoriously famous for making innovation choices based on the serendipity of extraordinary individuals such as Steve Jobs. 2

Nonetheless, in the sense of the most revealing inventions made through a serendipitous approach they are broadly categorized into three types:3

  • Discovery, that was not sought (e.g. Velcro)
  • Discovery, that was being sought, but found in an unexpected way (e.g. vulcanization)
  • Discovery, whose use is different than originally planned (e.g. Post-It).

Moreover the essence of serendipity can only be explored with an open mindset if not with the larger organization at least within the confines of the design culture. It essentially requires moving beyond our personal customs, culture, and prejudices and observing the external considerations of the customers as well, and by learning to spot the opportunities while simultaneously connecting with the internal views and research. This may appear to be a highly contradictory and an arduous exercise but adding the quality of serendipity to the research spectrum would eventually lead to some surprising results. It’s worth taking a chance.

  1. Collins, R. (n.d.). The Key to Innovation: Serendipity. Retrieved February 29, 2020, from https://optimityadvisors.com/insights/blog/key-innovation-serendipity ↩︎

  2. Medeiros, J. (2018, June 26). Here’s Why Steve Jobs Said Intuition is Absolutely More Powerful Than Intellect. Retrieved February 29, 2020, from https://www.goalcast.com/2018/06/26/steve-jobs-said-intuition-is-more-powerful-than-intellect/ ↩︎

  3. Meige, A. (2015, September 18). Serendipity and Innovation. Retrieved February 29, 2020, from https://open-organization.com/en/2010/04/25/serendipity-and-innovation/ ↩︎

Innovative Thinking And User-Centred Design

October 10, 2019 Design

The term “innovation” has become the favourite lexicon of corporate executives for any discussion relating to building a vision for their organizations, and obviously the startups who need to raise eyebrows for getting noticed and getting funded. ‘Innovation’ has an aura that sets our imagination rolling, often conjuring up an impression of an impossible modern future replete with robots, gadgets, and automative mechanisms. In short, it’s presumed that innovation would hand out an inventive gadget, service, or product that will make our lives a lot pleasurable with delightful interactions. For instance, skillfully using technologies such as AI to track your location and provide an accurate weather forecast or respond smartly to your question, putting wireless sensors so that you’re able to park your car smoothly. As I write this article there are numerous startups engrossed in experimenting with future technologies in shaping our landscape. Although the role of the ‘customer’ is being diminished somewhere between the business, the investors’ expectations & the discussion surrounding innovative technology. It’s not just a need to involve the target audience in an end-to-end product or service development activity but critically put the ‘customer’ in the centre of every innovation conversation.

Innovation by Design

Innovation Through Customer Insights

Organizations have acknowledged the significance of customer experience in sustaining future innovations, during and after any innovative idea is launched. However, the intrinsic drive of entrepreneurs to solve problems through technology has never gained so much visibility than in recent times as companies make attempts at product development for market dominance & financial gains. At times, this drives focus away from the customer experience and onto developing features that may miss the target audience invariably putting the entire roadmap of the product in jeopardy. For some startups or companies, the issue of relentless product development without managing customer expectations seems to be emanating from their internal challenges that are dictated more or less by corporate decisions. So for instance, on a strategic level, senior stakeholders choose a platform for driving automation for customer needs either without an understanding of the user-base or taking insights from a previous product launch. Eventually, by the time the “idea” percolates down to the tactical phase, one cannot rule out the complexity of its interaction and flow regardless of whether it’s solving any problems based on the experience that it delivers (or it doesn’t). Organizations back their leadership’s decisions of shaping the vision and it’s left upon the dev & design teams to implement the final product, within a strict timeline, despite the glaring loopholes and no understanding of the evolving user base. Designers obviously take a backseat.

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