Enterprise Sporadic Innovation Motivating Factor Research

Nowadays, the only way for most companies to earn a living is to judge quickly and to make hasty responses to the fugacious market. The furious competition leaves no time for those agitated firms, who struggle to survive, to do a comprehensive but meticulous consideration. Corporations become impatient and hard-nosed. They turn to be reluctant to put much stake on the uncertainty, and even begin to discredit the necessity of the long-term strategy. In this trend, radical innovation fades out of the vision of most companies. However, some firms often get interesting findings or valuable gains by chance, and others call it serendipity. These incidental gains usually present great value and introduce revolutionary technology to the world. Taking the power of chance more seriously, we will find the serendipity is one of the significant sources of radical innovation. So the fortuitous event, if being encouraged, may be the substitution of radical innovation and will be instrumental to shaping the firm's promising future in a casual way.Though the hap is too elusive for human to grasp, we are able to incite it and make better preparation when the opportunity strikes on. Through a general retrospect of pertinent theory on serendipity and creativity, this study presents a new concept— —serendipitous innovation, which means the innovation inspired by contingency. After makes an induction on the characteristic and the constituent of this kind of innovative process, on which the model on the course of serendipitous innovation is built, this study analyses the possible factors of different phase and presents another inducing factor model on serendipitous innovation.Unlike most of the literature on this topic, which focuses on the personal impacts on serendipity, this paper discusses the influence brought by the inner environment of corporation. After the investigation on a pack of corporations and the empirical study on 104 firms in China, the factor-model has been modified and the vital factors have been recognized. They are the standardization of R&D flow, the fail program, the diversity of personnel interests, the stock of knowledge, the research incline, redundance of resource, informal communication and marketing.This study brings forward a fresh research perspective on this field, and provides some reference on how to induce serendipitous innovation for a corporation.