\label{sec:by-example}
We adapt the conceptual framework for describing serendipity proposed by . This section will briefly introduce the relevant concepts, and illustrate them by means of historical examples of serendipity.
Serendipity relies on a reassessment or reevaluation – a focus shift in which something that was previously uninteresting, of neutral, or even negative value, becomes interesting.
Focus shift: George de Mestral, an electrical engineer by training, and an experienced inventor, returned from a hunting trip in the Alps. He removed several burdock burrs from his clothes and his dog’s fur and became curious about how they worked. After examining them under a microscope, he realised the possibility of creating a new kind of fastener that worked in a similar fashion, laying the foundations for the hook-and-loop mechanism in Velcro.
A focus shift is brought about by the meeting of a serendipity trigger and a prepared mind. The next step involves building a bridge to a valuable result.
Prepared mind: Fleming’s “prepared mind” included his focus on carrying out experiments to investigate influenza as well as his previous experience that showed that foreign substances in petri dishes can kill bacteria. He was concerned above all with the question “Is there a substance which is harmful to harmful bacteria but harmless to human tissue?” \cite[p. 161]{roberts}.
Serendipity trigger: The trigger does not directly cause the outcome, but rather, inspires a new insight. It was long known by Quechua medics that cinchona bark stops shivering. In particular, it worked well to stop shivering in malaria patients, as was observed when malarial Europeans first arrived in Peru. The joint appearance of shivering Europeans and a South American remedy was the trigger. That an extract from cinchona bark can cure and can even prevent malaria was learned subsequently.
Bridge: The bridge often includes reasoning techniques, such as abductive inference (what might cause a clear patch in a petri dish?); analogical reasoning (de Mestral constructed a target domain from the source domain of burrs hooked onto fabric); and conceptual blending (Kekulé, discoverer of the benzene ring structure, blended his knowledge of molecule structure with his vision of a snake biting its tail). The bridge may also rely on new social arrangements, such as the formation of cross-cultural research networks.
Result: This may be a new product, artefact, process, hypothesis, a new use for a material substance, and so on. The outcome may contribute evidence in support of a known hypothesis, or a solution to a known problem. Alternatively, the result may itself be a new hypothesis or problem. The result may be “pseudoserendipitous” in the sense that it was sought, while nevertheless arising from an unknown, unlikely, coincidental or unexpected source. More classically, it is an unsought finding, such as the discovery of the Rosetta stone.
The four components described above have attributes that may be present to a greater or lesser degree. These are: Chance – how likely was the trigger to appear?; Curiosity – how likely was this trigger to be identified as interesting?; Sagacity – how likely was it that the interesting trigger would be turned into a result?; – and Value (how valuable is the result that is ultimately produced?).
Chance: Fleming noted: “There are thousands of different moulds” – and “that chance put the mould in the right spot at the right time was like winning the Irish sweep.” It is important to notice that he was in the right spot at the right time as well – and that this was not a complete coincidence. The chance events we’re interested in always include at least one observer.
Curiosity: Curiosity can dispose a creative person to begin or to continue a search into unfamiliar territory. We use this word to describe both simple curiosity and related deeper drives. Charles Goodyear reflects on his own life experience as follows: “[F]rom the time his attention was first given to the subject, a strong and abiding impression was made upon his mind, that an object so desirable and important, and so necessary to man’s comfort, as the making of gum-elastic available to his use, was most certainly placed within his reach. Having this presentiment, of which he could not divest himself, under the most trying adversity, he was stimulated with the hope of ultimately attaining this object.”
Sagacity: This old-fashioned word is related to “wisdom,” “insight,” and especially to “taste” – and describes the attributes, or skill, of the discoverer that contribute to forming the bridge between the trigger and the result. writes: “[M]en had for centuries noticed such ‘trivial’ occurrences as slips of the tongue, slips of the pen, typographical errors, and lapses of memory, but it required the theoretic sensitivity of a Freud to see these as strategic data through which he could extend his theory of repression and symptomatic acts.”
Value: Positive judgements of serendipity by a third party would be less likely in scenarios in which “One man’s loss is another man’s gain” than in scenarios where “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” One quite literal example is the Swiss company Freitag, started by design students who built a business around “upcycling” used truck tarpaulins into bags and backpacks. Thanks in part to clever marketing , their product has sold well. Wherever possible, we prefer an independent judgement of value \cite{jordanous:12}.
Finally, serendipity seems to be more likely for agents who experience and participate in a dynamic world, who are active in multiple contexts, occupied with multiple tasks, and who avail themselves of multiple influences.
Dynamic world: Information about the world develops over time, and is not presented as a complete, consistent whole. In particular, value may come later. Van Andel estimates that in twenty percent of innovations “something was discovered before there was a demand for it.” To illustrate the role of this factor, it may be most revealing to consider a counterexample, in a case where dynamics were not attended to carefully and the outcome suffered as a result. Cropley describes the pathologist Eugen Semmer’s failure to recognise the importance of the role of penicillium notatum in restoring two unwell horses to health: “Semmer saw the horses’ return to good health as a problem that made it impossible for him to investigate the cause of their death, and reported … on how he had succeeded in eliminating the mould from his laboratory!” This example shows that knowledge is not the only relevant condition for mental preparedness: the investigator also needs to have a suitable frame of mind, one that is ready to make a jump into the unknown as the world changes. In a certain sense it is necessary to be able to “overcome” situated cognition, or at least be ready to revise the plan as the situation changes \cite{bereiter1997situated}.
Multiple contexts: One of the dynamical aspects at play may be the discoverer going back and forth between different contexts with different stimuli. 3M employee Arthur Fry sang in a church choir and needed a good way to mark pages in his hymn book; he happened to have been attending seminars offered by his colleague Silver about restickable glue.
Multiple tasks: Even within what would typically be seen as a single context, a discoverer may take on multiple tasks that segment the context into sub-contexts, or that cause the investigator to look in more than one direction. The tasks may have an interesting overlap, or they may point to a gap in knowledge. For example, Penzias and Wilson used a large antenna to detect radio waves that were relayed by bouncing off of satellites. After they had removed interference effects due to radar, radio, and heat, they found residual ambient noise that couldn’t be eliminated.
Multiple influences: The bridge from trigger to result is often found by making use of a social network, thus, Penzias and Wilson only understood the significance of their work after reading a preprint by Jim Peebles that hypothesised the possibility of measuring radiation released by the big bang.
We will show how the key condition, components, dimensions and environmental factors of serendipity can be modelled and assessed in computational systems in Sections \ref{sec:our-model} and \ref{sec:computational-serendipity}.