Serendipitous Learning in Collaborative Innovation in the Fight Against Severe Hypoglycemia

In the past decades we have witnessed an increase in collaborative innovation projects in the healthcare industry, and more recently some of these projects are of a broad pre-competitive nature where universities, research institutions, pharmaceutical, biotech and device companies work together to solve grand challenges in health. In this paper we investigate what organizations learn from participating in these non-commercial collaborations. Studies on open innovation, when assessing the benefits from such collaborations, have thus far focused on purposeful knowledge creating activities that lead to the achievement of planned objectives. However, in complex innovation where problems are often ill-defined, a focus on planned objectives and final outcomes, we risk ignoring important learnings that were not planned, but that instead emerged in the process. This paper argues that underneath the intentional knowledge building mode there is a more subtle ‘dwelling’ mode where intent is immanent in adaptive action and where new knowledge emerges in a non-deliberate way through everyday practices. To better understand the non-deliberate emergence of knowledge we apply a serendipity lens, suggesting that innovation and new knowledge creation can be seen as emerging and as accidental, unrelated side effects in collaborative processes leading to unexpected and beneficial discoveries. To investigate how organizations can embrace such serendipitous learnings emerging in inter-organizational collaborations, we carried out a 3-year study of an inter-organizational R&D project in the healthcare industry. We found several instances of distributed serendipitous learning and relate them to four organizational features (organizational setup, future-oriented mindset, sustained involvement, and heterogeneity in participants) that appeared to foster knowledge transfer from the inter-organizational settings to the focal company. The paper contributes to prior research on the roles and practices in knowledge absorption from inter-organizational innovation activities.