Chance, Luck, and Serendipity in Strategy and Management
细分领域
What are the conceptual demarcations, operationalizations, antecedents, and consequences of chance, luck, and serendipity in management and strategy?
How could luck and serendipity be operationalized and measured in ways that make them more accessible to larger-scale quantitative studies? Interesting insights could borrow from but also distinguish the concepts from related ones, such as novelty, opportunity discovery, opportunity creation, problem-solving, sensemaking, or absorptive capacity.
What is the role of counterfactuals, and how could counterfactual thinking be used to study the tension between luck and managerial foresight in incumbent companies?
What role does luck, serendipity, or managerial foresight play in explaining sustained innovation success, or lack thereof, especially in the face of successive cycles of innovation or market changes?
Is an initial lucky start sufficient to explain subsequent success? Even if a firm by luck or serendipity recognizes an opportunity before competitors do, what makes the difference between opportunity discovery and opportunity development or opportunity creation in explaining performance heterogeneity among firms?
What is the relationship between chance, luck, and serendipity and core strategy concepts such as competitive advantage? Where do these concepts fit in the spectrum between emergent strategy and planning?
What is the role of context regarding how luck, chance, and serendipity are being perceived and approached within firms? How do processes unfold differently across different cultural contexts, different work settings (e.g., virtual vs. in-person), top management teams (e.g., diverse vs. homogeneous), novel technologies (e.g., generative artificial intelligence), types of companies (e.g., startup enterprises vs. incumbents), and temporality (e.g., (perceived) bad luck at one point might be (perceived) good luck at another)?
What is the dark side of luck? What is the role of “bad luck”, and what do we know about managing it?
What is the link between chance, luck, and serendipity and tackling global societal and environmental challenges? Given the complexity of societal and environmental issues, many of the solutions might be unknown a priori and serendipitously emerge via experimentation. How can incumbent companies “prepare” for this?
Related questions could focus on the link between chance, luck, and serendipity and inequality. The possibility to encounter luck or serendipity is not equally distributed within or across organizations. What are the implications of this for strategic management in relation to grand challenges such as inequality?
How could analogies from other fields where luck and serendipity play a major role (e.g., scientific discovery, the arts, among others) inform strategy and management?
Finally, how could high-uncertainty contexts such as emerging markets and ‘Base of the Pyramid’ settings inform this topic?
