Respect Serendipity

"Business is filled with people who have become efficient planners, schedulers and time managers. Much more rare is an individual who has developed the awareness and flexibility to notice unexpected opportunities.", says J. Willard Marriott, Chairman and President of Marriott Corporation.

"It is not what the vision is, but what the vision does." - R. Fritz
"Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought." - Albert Szent-Györgyi.

Those wise statements of well respected experts of various fields show, that in our new innovation landscape, we should focus more on nurturing these kinds of unexpected but happy outcomes.

In the history of science we have numerous good examples of serendipitous discoveries:

• the principle of Archimedes
• Columbus finding America, a sick Indian discovering quinine
• Sir Isaac Newton and the Law of Gravitation

More recent examples are smallpox vaccination, synthetic rubber, finding the structure of DNA, celluloid, rayon, insulin, X-rays, nuclear fission, substitute sugar, safety glass, penicillin, nylon, polyethylene, Teflon, Aspirin, Post-it, Viagra, SMS message technology and it's usage in daily communications by hundreds of millions of people every day etc.

In Oasis philosophy serendipity has taken a vital role, in fact one could say now, that when we started five years ago to look for an improvement of science park's innovation environment, we started a very important and great journey full of serendipitous accidents.

We did not even know the word "serendipity", it came along while travelling - so even finding the phenomena and the right word for it - was serendipity.

During these years we have cultivated our thinking around serendipity, how to create environments to support it to happen, how to help new combinations of competences to emerge, how to attract enough diversity, how to encourage people towards increased interaction, how to promote collaboration instead of co-operation - with the global network of Oasises we want to bring these opportunities everywhere in the world.

In our toolbox for the new global innovation landscape we have various solutions for increasing your chance to enjoy serendipity. FlexLab- and netWork Oasis concepts, GLOW interaction tool, Serendipity Management and Network Incubation practises are all in your proposal, if you decide to make a revolutionary move in your thinking and actions.