Engineered serendipity as a key to systematic innovation

If you’re a foodie like me then you must be familiar with the Microplane line of kitchen utensils. Through a patented process of chemically generating razor sharp edges on its products, Microplane allows you to zest and grate with greater utilization of the material you are using (cheese, fruit, chocolate, etc’) i.e. generate the most surface area per weight and that leads to more flavor which is what all food lovers look for.

The moral of this story lies in the power of serendipity (a happy coincidence) and what organizations can do to set themselves up for more serendipitous events to occur

The fascinating part in microplane’s story is that its origins are at a family business that manufactured parts for machines in the hi-tech printing industry. The sharp edges it generated were a bi-product and weren’t even considered a core competency. In 1990, as the two brothers who owned Grace manufacturing realized that the industry their business was built on was in the process of dying out, an idea struck Richard Grace who realized so many sharp edges were lying around the factory and thought it would be a good idea to make that into the differentiator of woodworking tools. In essence, the idea was to enter a completely new market with clear differentiation based on their patent protected manufacturing process. No one thought these tools would be used for other purposes and they were offered at hardware stores.

The wife of a hardware store owner borrowed his Microplane woodworking tool to zest citrus fruit for her orange cake.

What happened five years later was a great surprise to everyone involved. The wife of a hardware store owner borrowed his Microplane woodworking tool to zest citrus fruit for her orange cake. Apparently, the razor sharp edges of the Microplane tool shaved the zest surgically instead of tearing into it like other kitchen utensils did at the time. This started a line of kitchen utensils which revolutionized what home and professional cooks could do with their ingredients. Funny things is, despite the inventor’s reluctance to accept this turn of events (the intention was to manufacture “serious” wood- working tools), the kitchen product line constituted 65% of the company’s revenues as late as 2011.

The moral of this story lies in the power of serendipity. When we expose real value making it available to potential beneficiaries - they will find ways of extracting that value. Hence the concept of the experiment. In order to be effective, innovation systems must include an element of experimentation. The more we try things, the more we expose value to its potential beneficiaries (even in a very raw and unintentional form), we increase our overall probability of striking gold. There's a saying that luck is when opportunity meets preparation. Serendipity is a probability game and ongoing innovation related action by an organization in a sustainable way is a means of increasing overall probability and actually engineering serendipitous outcomes.

Serendipity is a probability game and ongoing innovation related action by an organization in a sustainable way is a means of increasing overall probability and actually engineering serendipitous outcomes.

Reference: https://kitchenproject.com/history/Microplane/index.htm