BIO:

Garima Sharma is an Assistant Professor at Kogod School of Business, American University. Her research focuses on organizational tensions and paradoxes such as the tensions of purpose and profits. She is also interested in understanding how research impacts practice, and the topics of rigor–relevance and knowledge cocreation. Garima’s research has been published in Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Business Venturing, and Journal of Applied Psychology, and Journal of Management Studies, among others. Garima is a Consulting Editor at the Journal of Management Studies. She is on the editorial review boards of Academy of Management Journal, and Organization & Environment.

ABSTRACT: 

Serendipity depends on interactions among people and ideas, yet actors often commit time and resources only if they can be assured of specific outcomes. Our longitudinal study of the Wayfinder Institute, an initiative established to reimagine corporate innovation, examines how organizations sustained the space of potentiality for serendipity amid pressures to predetermine outcomes. The organization used three temporal practices, which constitute what we term potentiality work, that thickened the present to enrich potential associations. We extend serendipity research by showing that the space of potentiality must be continually produced to foster serendipity. We also show how potentiality work can ease the tension between the openness that design literature argues is needed to foster novelty and the fixed goals that strategy research claims motivate sustained engagement.