The idea

The line and its break

Innovation management is built as a process, and for good reason: without stage gates, prioritisation and resource logic, nothing gets finished. The price of this order is a built-in blindness. A process can only evaluate what appears in its categories. Anything that cuts across them shows up not as an opportunity but as a disturbance — and is reliably sorted out, often by competent people with good arguments.

The new, however, does not emerge in the middle of the categories but at their edges. That is why a linear process needs a mechanism that regularly knocks it off track without destroying it. This is not a question of creativity, and it is not a culture issue. It is an engineering task.

Why “chance” is the wrong concept

It is tempting to discuss this problem under the heading of chance. The term is popular, and the literature on serendipity is extensive. As a product promise, though, it fails: chance is by definition beyond control. Whoever offers it promises what cannot be delivered — and ends up with a random generator. There are hundreds of those, and not one of them has ever changed a decision.

The alternative is not to define chance away. It is real and cannot be circumvented. The alternative is to switch the variable: it is not chance that gets steered, but the readiness to work with what it washes up.

What deliberate irritation means

Unlike chance, irritation can be dosed. It has a strength, a direction, an addressee and a moment. It can be too weak — then it is ignored; it can be too strong — then it is fended off. In between lies a narrow band in which it changes thinking instead of producing resistance. “Deliberate” means exactly that: placed and answered for, not suffered.

This shifts the management task. It is not about generating more chance, but about increasing the share of conditions that can be manufactured — professionally foreign neighbourhoods, not discarding anomalies on sight, an eye for patterns trained over years. Chance then strikes someone who is prepared. That is the house edge, and it is the only one this game has.

Why there is no penicillin story here

This topic comes with a fixed stock of anecdotes: penicillin, Post-it, Viagra, the microwave. They get told because they tell well, and they are the main reason the subject is dismissed in professional circles as fireside storytelling.

The problem is not that they are wrong, but that the short version always drops the one link that matters. With Fleming, the decisive fact is not the open petri dish — it is that the same man had made a structurally identical observation seven years earlier with lysozyme, and had been searching systematically for exactly this pattern ever since. Chance struck the only eye in London trained to see it. It is precisely this part that routinely falls out of the story — and with it the only lesson of any operational value.

What comes of it

From this position an instrument is emerging step by step: first as a workshop format that works with irritations on concrete ventures, later possibly as a digital tool. The order is intentional. A tool whose effect has not first been tested in the room is software on suspicion.