The Science of Serendipity

The world doesn’t need any more innovation books exhorting us to ‘kick back and get groovy’.They’re often an irritating read, written by the kind of man (it’s always an alpha male) you’d dread sitting next to on a plane. For some reason these are often Scandinavian ex-academics in leather trousers. “Hey, we write marketing plans while listening to the Prodigy. Get us.”

I’ve always been wary of the innovation consultancy ? What if! – partly for those overemphatic punctuation marks and partly because,as a supplier, I have a couple of times arrived on the scene a few months after ?Whatif! had run a programme, when those who were involved are still radiating good vibes from the emotional intensity of the experience (“You had to be there, man!”) while the programme is clearly unravelling around them. My prejudice was that innovation interventions are too often a holiday romance.That’s why this book is so great.

It tackles the implementation challenge head-on. As Matt Kingdon says in his conclusion: “The common theme throughout this book is the potentially corrosive impact a large organisation can have on our ability to innovate… we now know enough about how innovation works in large companies to pre-empt the inevitable roadblocks.” The chapter on how to ensure success in the real world, ‘Battling the corporate machine,navigating naysayers’, is worth the price of the book alone.

There are great ideas here about defining the financial gap that innovation needs to plug, putting targets and labels on stuff that could otherwise evaporate, and how to define a battle plan for the struggle ahead. The point he makes about the grapevine as the most powerful communications channel, and how to seed it with positive stories, is superb. The earlier chapters are also terrific. Each one starts with a page that should be compulsory in all business books, entitled ‘If you only had 30 seconds, I’d tell you…’. These are wonderful digests that tempt you to skim the book but actually suck you in to the very readable, theory- and jargon-free chapters.The usual suspects are namechecked – Innocent, Apple, Method and Zappos – but there’s a reason why these brands are the key texts in this field.

They’re the best practice we can learn from. Inspiring examples of companies who ‘did this, which resulted in that’ are scattered throughout. Above all, the book makes innovation feel do-able in everyday practice, rather than something that needs to be taken down off the shelf every so often to pep things up. Much of this comes from Kingdon’s breezy, down-to-earth style. I’d love to sit next to him on a plane.

The Science of Serendipity by Matt Kingdon, published by John Wiley and Sons