1. The Origin and Meaning of Serendipity

Serendipity is defined as 'the power that turns chance into success,' 'the power that seizes chance and transforms it into good fortune,' 'the ability to make fortunate discoveries by chance,' 'the attitude that produces desirable discoveries through chance,' and 'the ability to find valuable things one was not looking for,' among other definitions.

Serendipity was originally coined by the eighteenth-century British novelist Horace Walpole (1717-1797), and the specific circumstances of its coinage are found in a letter he wrote to Sir Horace Mann in 1754.

“This discovery is almost of the kind that I call Serendipity, a very expressive word... I once read a silly fairy tale called *The Three Princes of Serendip (present-day Sri Lanka)*. As their highnesses traveled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of.”

Horace Walpole was so struck by the Persian tale *The Three Princes of Serendip* that he wrote to his friend Horace Mann proposing that 'great discoveries made by chance' be called serendipity. From this point on, the word serendipity came to be used in its present-day sense. The relevant original passage from *The Three Princes of Serendip* reads as follows.[1]

“The brothers stated in turn as follows... He must be blind in the right eye, because the grass on the left side, though no thicker than that on the right, was the only side eaten. The camel had bad teeth, because the manner in which it had eaten the grass showed that its teeth were poor. The camel was lame, because only three hoofprints appeared clearly, while the fourth showed signs of being dragged... They surmised that one side of the camel's load was full of butter, because many ants had gathered on that side of the camel's tracks, and that the other side carried honey, because many flies had gathered along the other side. Noticing footprints near the spot where the camel had knelt, they found traces of a woman's urine and thus surmised that a woman must have been riding it... And the third prince concluded that the woman was pregnant, because handprints nearby appeared to be marks left by her hand as she used it to raise herself up after urinating.”

As shown in the passage above, Horace Walpole read of the princes discovering new value by chance, and using the book's title, he coined the word serendipity to mean the chance discovery of something one had not been looking for.

The reasons why serendipity is meaningful for us who live in contemporary society, and especially for us who live in the Republic of Korea, and the reasons why we should pay attention to serendipity, may be summarized as follows.

First, serendipity gives significant weight to unexpected and chance events that had previously gone unaddressed or could not be addressed. By emphasizing serendipity, our society—accustomed to handling matters through rational sentiment—is given an occasion to consider things that appear to lie outside reason. In fact, although we who live in contemporary society claim to handle most matters through rational sentiment, this is often not actually the case. More often than not, matters are handled irrationally rather than rationally. For example, we tend to think of intelligence as deliberate and conscious behavior that operates according to fixed laws. Yet mental activity is, to a considerable extent, carried out unconsciously through processes divorced from logic—and intuition is precisely one such process.[2]

Serendipity is able to encompass such things. In a certain sense, the mistakes and failures of those who make an effort have been disregarded by existing society, particularly Korean society. Yet as many cases of serendipity show, chance mistakes and failures have often led to new discoveries and inventions. Serendipity research can therefore provide a theoretical basis for encompassing the mistakes and failures that occur in the course of sincere 'effort.' For example, Angry Birds was born out of fifty-two attempts and failures over eight years,[3] and Uniqlo has encouraged its employees to take on challenges and emphasized an entrepreneurial spirit through its management philosophy of '1 win, 9 losses.'[4] BMW selects a 'most creative mistake of the month' award to encourage creative mistakes.[5] We must now move beyond modernity and turn our attention to what lies beyond the limits of reason.

Second, even so, serendipity ultimately handles such matters through rational methods and offers a rational course of action. Even while encompassing what belongs to the irrational domain, it presents a rational alternative that can be reasonably understood. In the end, the value and significance lie in this rational approach to irrational matters.

Third, serendipity offers ordinary people a viable path to success. In a certain sense, many of the figures who have contributed to the development of human society were exceptional beings endowed with innate talent, unlike ordinary people. It is nearly impossible for ordinary people to emulate such figures. However, the figures discussed in relation to serendipity are ordinary people who applied themselves diligently to their own work. In this respect, serendipity can offer ordinary people a more attainable path.

What serendipity deals with is primarily related to chance. In modern thinking, chance has appeared quite unfamiliar and has been regarded as something to be broken down and overturned. Yet looking back on the path humanity has walked, it is punctuated throughout by various chance and unexpected events that led to success. In the field of science, many discoveries and inventions have been made, and a great many of them are related to serendipity. Universal gravitation, X-rays, penicillin, and Viagra are examples of this, as of course is the dynamite invented by Nobel. In the end, serendipity has enabled us to reflect on parts of our lives that had been lost or overlooked, and these have been born as creations that have transformed humanity.

Shirakawa Hideki (白川英樹), professor emeritus at the University of Tsukuba, received the 2000 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his contribution to the 'discovery and development of conductive polymers,' that is, 'plastic that conducts electricity.' At the time, the chair of the selection committee used the word serendipity to praise Dr. Shirakawa's achievement. This may be because Dr. Shirakawa encountered at least two instances of 'chance good fortune' in the course of inventing 'plastic that conducts electricity.'[6] In this way, there are far too many cases around us in which 'chance good fortune' has operated and led to great inventions. First, representative cases of serendipity in the history of science and engineering are summarized as follows.[7]

[Table Ⅰ.1] Representative Cases of Serendipity in the History of Science and Engineering

There are many such unexpected discoveries and inventions around us. To put it more broadly, most of the many things around us are things made through such unexpected, chance occurrences. And even the Earth on which we live was born out of chance.[8]

Serendipity is also put to use in operating organizations and institutions. As informatization and globalization have given rise to diverse situations, and as cases of success that cannot be explained by past logic, rational approaches, and rationality have emerged, interest in serendipity has grown greater than before. Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook, said, “Facebook embodies the concept of serendipity, an unexpected stroke of good fortune.”[9] Likewise, when asked how Google succeeded, Sergey Brin, one of Google's founders, answered, “The number one factor in success is luck.”[10] Indeed, the closer one looks, the more one finds matters that cannot be resolved by rational standards alone. If so, then what exactly is good fortune? What is chance?