Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Serendipity, the idea that research in one area often leads to advances in another, has been a central idea in the economics of innovation and science and technology policy, particularly in debates about the feasibility and desirability of targeting public R&D investments. 

This paper starts from the idea that serendipity is a hypothesis, not a fact. In it, I provide a preliminary report on a study of serendipity in research funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). I examine the serendipity hypothesis as it has typically been articulated debates about NIH funding: the claim that progress against specific diseases often results from unplanned research, or unexpectedly from research oriented towards different diseases. To do so, I compare the disease foci of NIH grants to those of the publications and drugs that result.