Have you ever heard of serendipity ? This word that my spell checker doesn’t know defines a concept that we all or almost all knew.
Definition
Serendipity is defined as “the conjunction of serendipity that allows the researcher to make an unexpected discovery of greater importance or interest than the object of his initial research, and the ability of this same researcher to seize and exploit this chance. Cambridge.org defines serendipity more simply as “the ability, the art of making a discovery by chance”.
Origin of the word
It is rare in our articles that we spend so much time defining the term we introduce, but serendipity is worth the detour. The term was born in 1754 in a letter from Horace Walpole to his friend Horace Mann, telling him how he had solved a riddle by accident: “[…] This discovery, indeed, is almost of that kind which I call Serendipity, a very expressive word, which, as I have nothing better to tell you, I shall endeavour to explain to you: you will understand it better by the derivation than by the definition. I once read a silly fairy tale, called the three Princes of Serendip: as their Highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of: for instance, one of them discovered that a mule blind of the right eye had travelled the same road lately, because the grass was eaten only on the left side, where it was worse than on the right—now do you understand Serendipity? […].”
Serendipity in everyday life
As I announced in the introduction, the concept of serendipity is not totally unknown to us, and we encounter it on a daily basis. We could almost call the serendipity of finding a 20 franc bill on the street serendipity.
Post-it
We have lost count of the number of times the post-it note has been presented as an example of accidental innovation, but now we can take it as an example of Serendipity. It is in 1970 that the glue that will allow the post-it to become these small squares of paper that can be glued and unglued at will is discovered by chance. But it is only 10 years later that, also by chance, we found a use for these famous Post-its. 
Velcro
You probably also know the story of the invention of Velcro by heart. George de Mestral had the idea of analyzing the fruits of burdock hanging on his clothes under a microscope, which gave him the idea of Velcro. 
The list of examples of serendipity is still long, we can note :
- The carambar
- Aspartame
- Viagra
- The microwave oven
- Nutella
- The tarte tatin
What next ? As Sylvie Cattelin notes, the term serendipity is a term whose definition evolves over time. The author also specifies that one cannot “program serendipity”. On the other hand, if you are looking for new ideas, you can always call on Think2make to accompany you in your ideation phase.