Serendipity: A way of stimulating researchers' creativity

Abstract

By nature, research is a trek into the unknown by routes that may include a research pilgrimage like attending academic conferences, conducting interviews and experiments, and reading related research often via the digital environment that characterizes higher education in the 21st Century. They may find all sorts of information to include pointers to new techniques or techniques that could be adapted to address a burning issue in society or science. However, how their process of discovery actually happened is rarely reported and chance not admitted to as being a factor. Yet, in reality, researchers are very happy when finding something vital to their research, which they did not know beforehand that they would find, referred to as serendipity. Little is known about how researchers can harness serendipity and stimulate their creativity in making it work for them. This work investigates the methods by which discoveries are serendipitously made in research that can stimulate researchers’ creativity toward making unexpected discoveries.

Keywords

• Serendipity in research
• Serendipitous discovery
• Creativity in research
• Innovation