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This paper aims to explore how researchers in general, and field researchers in particular, might respond to systems of governance of the researchers' activity in ways that can support rather than distort the quality of the research.

We draw upon literature on serendipity to develop a framework for engaging with the positive and negative potentials of systems of governance. We ground our analysis in discussion of participation in the field comprising two parts: first, the examination of our own activities and second, the accounts of participation found in two career-autobiographical interviews with emeritus professors of management accounting from Japan.

We highlight the potential for a productive tension between two contrasting perspectives that researchers might take on governance of their activity. A contractual perspective sees the value of targets and detailed pre-planning. A reflexive perspective sees the value of exploring the unexpected and considering many alternatives. We offer a framework for considering serendipity and the conditions that facilitate serendipity to help researchers maintain a productive tension between these perspectives.

We build upon retrospective accounts of two successful individuals whose careers evolved in a specific context. The intention is not to set out what might be generally achievable in a research career, nor to propose specific lines of action or planning in relation to specific systems of governance, since these vary across countries and over time. Rather, the paper draws on these materials to illuminate the more general challenge of preparing for serendipity in a way that goes beyond simple opportunism.

We analyse how researchers' mindfulness of serendipity and the nature of contexts that facilitate serendipity can encourage a productive tension between contractual and reflexive perspectives on governance of academic activity.

This paper aims to outline the role that serendipity can play in providing a complementary and previously unrepresented vector in deliberate and emergent strategies within organizations.

The paper is conceptual in nature and draws upon the serendipity pattern in sociological theory and serendipitous relations in developmental sciences to provide a framework for executives to consider when examining the process of strategy formation. Two case vignettes are used to illustrate the difference between luck and serendipity and the paper also traces key micro foundations of serendipity by returning to the original serendipity fable and a famed science experiment producing “floppy-eared” rabbits.

The notion of chance favoring the “prepared firm” is espoused where the prepared organizational mind is positioned as an antecedent of serendipitous strategy formation. This is based on Louis Pasteur’s famous aphorism, “chance favors the prepared mind.” Components of the prepared firm include deep domain knowledge, anticipatory mindset, noticing, abductive reasoning, elaboration and relations development.

The paper is a conceptual articulation of a novel concept that now requires deeper empirical case development and ultimately statistical validation. The paper suggests linkages between serendipity and theories of absorptive capacity and the attention-based view of the firm.

Several mindsets, capabilities and relations for architecting organizational serendipity are suggested for executives using a stylized framework.

From a strategy process perspective, the Mintzberg and Waters seminal article “Of strategies deliberate and emergent” is complemented by considering “floppy-eared” strategy characterized by unexpected, anomalous and strategic datum.

Websites, search engines, recommender systems, artificial intelligence and digital libraries have the potential to support serendipity for unexpected interaction with information and ideas which would lead to favored information discoveries. This paper aims to explore the current state of research into serendipity particularly related to information encountering.

This study provides bibliometric review of 166 studies on serendipity extracted from the Web of Science. Two bibliometric analysis tools HisCite and RStudio (Biblioshiny) are used on 30 years of data. Citation counts and bibliographic records of the papers are assessed using HisCite. Moreover, visualization of prominent sources, countries, keywords and the collaborative networks of authors and institutions are assessed using RStudio (Biblioshiny) software. A total of 166 papers on serendipity were found from the period 1989 to 2022, and the most influential authors, articles, journals, institutions and countries among these were determined.

The highest numbers of 11 papers were published in the year 2019. Makri and Erdelez are the most influential authors for contributing studies on serendipity. “Journal of Documentation” is the top-ranking journal. University College London is the prominent affiliation contributing highest number of studies on serendipity. The UK and the USA are the prominent nations contributing highest number of research. Authorship pattern for research on serendipity reveals involvement of single author in majority of the studies. OA Green model is the most preferred model for archiving of research articles by the authors who worked on serendipity. In addition, majority of the research outputs have received a citation ranging from 0 to 50.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper may be the first bibliometric analysis on serendipity research using bibliometric tools in library and information science studies. The paper would definitely open new avenues for other serendipity researchers.

This article aims to gain a better understanding of the reasons why serendipity is designed for in different kinds of environments. Understanding these design intents sheds light on the value such designs bring to designers, in contrast to the users of the environment. In this way, the article seeks to contribute to the literature on cultivating serendipity from a designers’ point of view.

An extensive review of the literature discussing designing for serendipity was conducted to elicit the different motivations to design for serendipity. Based on these findings and a thorough analysis, a typology of design intents for serendipity is presented.

The article puts forward four intents to design for serendipity: serendipity as an ideal, common good, mediator and feature. It also highlights that the current academic discourse puts a strong emphasis on two of them. It is argued that this academic abstraction could be problematic for how we deal with designs for serendipity, both in theory and practice.

The novelty of this article is that it addresses the question of why to design for serendipity from a designer’s point of view. By introducing the notion of directionality it opens up the opportunity to discuss serendipity from multiple perspectives, which contributes to gaining a firmer understanding of serendipity. It allows to more explicitly formulate the different functions of a design for serendipity and thereby expands our knowledge on the value of designing for serendipity. At the same time, it sheds light on the potential threats to designing for serendipity.

Management research on serendipity, which is defined as a search that leads to an unintended discovery, has increased considerably over the last three decades. In this article, management research on serendipity (up to the end of 2021) is reviewed and synthesised.

A bibliometric analysis was conducted on 85 peer-reviewed articles extracted from the Scopus database, which was then integrated with a systematic literature review.

The bibliometric analysis revealed that management literature on serendipity is framed around four main thematic areas: conceptual boundaries, conditions favouring serendipity and outcomes, foreign market entry and the relationship between serendipity, networks and assets. A systematic literature review was then conducted on each of the identified clusters.

The present article offers a systematised view of the extant body of research on serendipity in management studies. Based on the findings, the main implications and future research agendas are discussed.

In “Coming across information serendipitously – Part 1: a process model” the authors identified common elements of researchers' experiences of “coming across information serendipitously”. These experiences involve a mix of unexpectedness and insight and lead to a valuable, unanticipated outcome. In this article, the authors aim to show how the elements of unexpectedness, insight and value form a framework for subjectively classifying whether a particular experience might be considered serendipitous and, if so, just how serendipitous.

The classification framework was constructed by analysing 46 experiences of coming across information serendipitously provided by 28 interdisciplinary researchers during critical incident interviews. “Serendipity stories” were written to summarise each experience and to facilitate their comparison. The common elements of unexpectedness, insight and value were identified in almost all the experiences.

The presence of different mixes of unexpectedness, insight and value in the interviewees' experiences define a multi‐dimensional conceptual space (which the authors call the “serendipity space”). In this space, different “strengths” of serendipity exist. The classification framework can be used to reason about whether an experience falls within the serendipity space and, if so, how “pure” or “dilute” it is.

The framework provides researchers from various disciplines with a structured means of reasoning about and classifying potentially serendipitous experiences.

The purpose of this paper is to propose evidence on the role of serendipity in business relationship. It concerns the understanding of the unplanned development of the relationship and the opportunities that may arise from taking serendipity as a “shaping” factor of relationship beginning.

The paper recurs to a longitudinal case study in the mechanical industry. In particular the development of the relationship between an Italian manufacturing company as supplier and a Chinese large customer is presented.

The case study highlights the role played by serendipity in the beginning and development of the business relationship between an Italian manufacturing company and a Chinese customer.

The main theoretical contribution of the paper is to point out how serendipity may affect business relationship development.

This research seeks to gain a detailed understanding of how researchers come across information serendipitously, grounded in real‐world examples. This research was undertaken to enrich the theoretical understanding of this slippery phenomenon.

Semi‐structured critical incident interviews were conducted with 28 interdisciplinary researchers. Interviewees were asked to discuss memorable examples of coming across information serendipitously from their research or everyday life. The data collection and analysis process followed many of the core principles of grounded theory methodology.

The examples provided were varied, but shared common elements (they involved a mix of unexpectedness and insight and led to a valuable, unanticipated outcome). These elements form part of an empirically grounded process model of serendipity. In this model, a new connection is made that involves a mix of unexpectedness and insight and has the potential to lead to a valuable outcome. Projections are made on the potential value of the outcome and actions are taken to exploit the connection, leading to an (unanticipated) valuable outcome.

The model provides researchers across disciplines with a structured means of understanding and describing serendipitous experiences.

This paper aims to present selected findings of a recent study of serendipity in information seeking, exploring the paradox of control inherent in the concept of “seeking serendipity”.

After providing an overview of the research study, the paper locates the research findings in the context of the literature. The discussion explores the research findings in relation to both the paradox of control and the related concept of “seeking serendipity”.

The definition/description of serendipity is examined, the concept of process‐perception duality is introduced, and links with the literature are explored. The discussion reassesses the paradox of control in light of the research findings, raising the possibility that information literacy educators have a role to play in developing the perception aspect of serendipity.

The paper proposes that, despite the possibly uncomfortable challenges presented by the paradox of control, serendipity deserves more recognition in professional practice. Increased acknowledgement and understanding of serendipity may enable professional practitioners to function more effectively in the unpredictable, dynamic environment that informs the reality of information seeking.

The paper adds to the limited existing empirical research investigating serendipity, increasing both academic and practical understanding of the phenomenon. In particular, the introduction of the concept of process‐perception duality provides a useful grounding for future research.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the changing research practices of historians, and to contrast their experiences of serendipity in physical and digital information environments.

In total, 20 historians in Southwestern Ontario participated in semi-structured, in-depth interviews. The interviews were transcribed and analyzed employing grounded theory. The analytical approach included memoing, the constant comparative method, and three phases of coding.

Four main themes were identified: agency, the importance of the physical library experience, digital information environments, and novel heuristic forms of serendipity. The authors found that scholars frequently used active verbs to describe their experience with serendipity. This suggests that agency is more involved in the experience than previous conceptualizations of serendipity have suggested, and led us to coin the term “incidental serendipity.” Other key findings include the need for digital tools to incorporate the context surrounding primary sources, and also to provide an organizational context much like what is encountered by patrons in library stacks.

The increased emphasis on digital materials should not come at the expense of the physical information environment, where historians often encounter serendipitous finds. A fine balance and a greater integration between digital and physical resources is needed in order to support scholars’ continued ability to make connections between materials. By showing the active role that historians take in their serendipitous encounters, this paper suggests that historical training is critical for eliciting incidental serendipitous encounters. The authors propose a novel approach, one that examines verbs in serendipity accounts.