This article focuses on how collective improvisation, as a play with situational affordances and constraints, can facilitate or elicit luck in social innovation processes. We propose the improvisation perspective to offer a means to move from ungovernable to governable serendipity in innovation. Furthermore, the article presents Trasformatorio, an innovation methodology based on the living lab approach, that takes innovation-through-improvisation as its premise. Following an analysis of Trasformatorio's social innovation efforts, we conclude that while governing serendipity may be a challenge, improvisation provides an opportunity to innovate responsibly. Improvisation refocuses ideas about unexpectedness and anchors the unforeseen to a process approach. This, in turn, leads to insights about how responsible social innovation can be governed by means of (1) situation awareness; (2) collective brokering; and (3) explicit reflection about how product and process, here conceptualised as part of a Design Space and Narrative Space respectively, interrelate.

From the Renaissance to the seventeenth century the phenomenon of tidal motion constituted one of the principal arguments of scientific debate. Understanding the times for high and low water was of course often essential for navigation, but local variations (which nowadays are attributed to currents, coastal configurations, prevailing winds, seabed shaping and other geographic characteristics) made an inductive approach impractical and precluded the possibility of constructing a universally valid model for predicting these times. Notwithstanding the complexity of the phenomenon and its practical import, however, the early-modern theory of tidal ebb and flow, as clearly emerges from Duhem's analysis, appears to be neither the result of the interpretation of empirical data, nor aimed to their prediction. Rather, the interest in tides was of a theoretical nature and was aroused particularly by their double nature, being at the same time variable and regular, terrestrial and astronomical.