A Call to Arms

I hope this book has made you think again and that you're excited by the challenge ahead of you. There isn't much more rewarding in life than staring at a blank page and then filling it with something of value – something you can point at and say ‘I did that!’ I hope this book has given you some ideas about what you can do to accelerate the innovation journey and shown you that there is indeed a science to serendipity.

Clearly the context for this book has not been entrepreneurial startups. Organisations at that heady stage of development don't need business books. Instead the common theme stranded through this book is the potentially corrosive impact a large organisation can have on our ability to innovate. This, to my mind, is a natural evolutionary fact of commercial life. But I do want to correct any misconceptions. I'm not saying that big is bad. In fact, get the corporate machine behind you and innovation can be a huge force for good in the world. It is simply my belief that we now know enough about how innovation works in large organisations to pre-empt the inevitable roadblocks. I don't think this was true 20 or even 10 years ago.

In this book I've switched between the words ‘serendipity’ and ‘innovation’. I see them as very similar concepts. Serendipity is the clever connection between seemingly unconnected points. The kind of thing people look at and say ‘That's so clever and so simple – why didn't I think of that?’ But serendipity is more than that; ...

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