Superglue, penicillin, X-rays, the pacemaker: All are examples of “happy accidents” – inventions by individuals trying to do one thing, and winding up with something superior to the original objective.

But can serendipity be “harnessed,” to make it actually work for a company? Researchers from Cornell, New York University and the University of Connecticut think that reflecting on unintended outcomes might lead to more and better ideas.

“We found that if you prompt employees to think about times that things didn’t go as they planned in their past, regardless whether the outcome was positive or negative, they actually get more creative,” said Alexander Fulmer ’15, assistant professor of marketing in the Cornell Peter and Stephanie Nolan School of Hotel Administration, in the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business.

“They generate more ideas during brainstorming,” he said, “and the ideas are of a higher quality compared to prompting them to think about times when everything went exactly as planned.”

Fulmer is corresponding author of “Unintentional Outcomes as a Catalyst for Brainstorming,” which published March 27 in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

Co-authors are Taly Reich, associate professor of marketing in the Stern School of Business, New York University; and Kelly Herd, associate professor of marketing in the University of Connecticut School of Business.

In a field experiment with marketing and sales employees at a candy company, as well as four laboratory studies, Fulmer and the team demonstrated that prompting people to reflect on a history of their own unintended outcomes in different situations can improve brainstorming.

Fulmer began to work on this research during his doctoral studies at Yale University. “My adviser and I were looking at circumstances where unintentionality can actually have positive effects,” he said, “which isn’t always obvious because you generally want things to go as you intended.”

In the field experiment, the researchers assigned 97 marketing and sales employees to one of two conditions – corresponding to intentional or unintentional outcomes – and asked them to write reflections on a time they had to present in front of an audience that either went as planned or did not. Participants in both groups were then asked to come up with as many ideas as they could for a campaign to promote one of the candy company’s existing products.

 Employees in the unintentional group generated an average of 2.56 ideas, compared to 1.73 ideas from the intentional group.

The subsequent lab experiments all revealed the same effect: Reflecting on times things didn’t go as planned – even if the unintended outcomes were positive – led to more ideas. The researchers think that people’s need to feel in control of a situation plays a role.

“We found that when people think about times that things didn’t go as planned in their past, it makes them feel less like they’re in control of their outcomes,” Fulmer said. “And people really don’t like to feel like their sense of control is threatened, so there’s this automatic inclination for them to try to regain control. And they do that by ideating more, and ideating more creatively.”

One study divided participants into three groups – intentional, unintentional and unintentional-positive. Because unintended outcomes are frequently negative, this was to determine whether reflecting on unintended positive outcomes had the same impact on creativity as unintended outcomes where the valence was not specified.

“People in both of those unintended-outcome conditions ideated more, and had higher-quality ideas, compared to people who thought about times that things just went as planned,” Fulmer said. “It was truly about the unintentionality.”

Managers can lead workers to think differently, based on past efforts that may not have gone exactly as planned, in a sense harnessing that unintentionality to their benefit

“In new-product development, for example, the first phase typically is idea-generation, where you’re just going for quantity of ideas,” Fulmer said. “You’re not trying to filter anything. And the value of that, according to past studies, is that the more ideas you come up with, without any inhibition and before you filter anything, the more likely it is that you’ll have at least one idea that you can expand on.”

“Anyone can think of times that things didn’t go as planned,” he said, “and that ends up helping them when they try to generate new ideas.”