\label{sec:literature-review} The English term “serendipity” derives from the 1302 long poem Eight Paradises, written in Persian by the Sufi poet Amīr Khusrow in Uttar Pradesh, India. After translations into Italian, French, and finally English, its first chapter was known as “The Three Princes of Serendip”, where “Serendip” ultimately corresponds to the Old Tamil-Malayalam word for Sri Lanka (Cerantivu, island of the Ceran kings). The term “serendipity” is first found in a 1757 letter by Horace Walpole to Horace Mann:
“This discovery is almost of that kind which I call serendipity, a very expressive word …You will understand it better by the derivation than by the definition. I once read a silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip: as their Highness travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents & sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of[.]” \cite[p. 633]{van1994anatomy}
The same story formed part of the inspiration for Voltaire’s Zadig, and “the method of Zadig” was used as a term of art in 19th Century philosophy of science \cite{huxley1894science}. Walpole’s term “serendipity” was used in print only 135 times before 1958, according to the survey carried out by Robert Merton and Elinor Barber, collected in The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity \citep{merton}. Merton describes his own understanding of a generalised “serendipity pattern” and its constituent parts as follows:
“The serendipity pattern refers to the fairly common experience of observing an unanticipated, anomalous and strategic datum which becomes the occasion for developing a new theory or for extending an existing theory.” \cite[p. 506]{merton1948bearing} [emphasis in original]
In 1986, Philippe Quéau described serendipity as “the art of finding what we are not looking for by looking for what we are not finding” (, as quoted in \cite[p. 121]{Campos2002}). Campbell defines it as “the rational exploitation of chance observation, especially in the discovery of something useful or beneficial.” Pek van Andel describes it simply as “the art of making an unsought finding.”
Roberts records 30 entries for the term “serendipity” from English language dictionaries dating from 1909 to 1989. Classic definitions require the investigator not to be aware of the problem they serendipitously solve, but this criterion has largely dropped from dictionary definitions. Only 5 of Roberts’ collected definitions explicitly say “not sought for.” Roberts characterises “sought findings” in which the discovery nevertheless follows from an accident as pseudoserendipity, after . While Walpole initially described serendipity as an event (i.e., a kind of discovery), it has since been reconceptualised as a psychological attribute, a matter of sagacity on the part of the discoverer: a “gift” or “faculty.” Only one of Roberts’ collected definitions defined it solely as an event, while five define it as both event and attribute.
Nevertheless, numerous historical examples exhibit features of serendipity and develop on a social scale rather than an individual scale. For instance, between Spencer Silver’s creation of high-tack, low-adhesion glue in 1968, Arthur Fry’s invention of a sticky bookmark in 1973, and the eventual launch of the distinctive canary yellow re-stickable notes in 1980, there were many opportunities for Post-it Notes not to have come to be \cite{tce-postits}. Merton and Barber argue that the psychological perspective needs to be integrated with a sociological perspective.
“For if chance favours prepared minds, it particularly favours those at work in microenvironments that make for unanticipated sociocognitive interactions between those prepared minds. These may be described as serendipitous sociocognitive microenvironments.” \cite[p. 259--260]{merton}
Large-scale scientific and technical projects generally rely on the convergence of interests of key actors and on other cultural factors. For example, Umberto Eco describes the historical role of serendipitous mistakes, falsehoods, and rumors in the production of knowledge .
Serendipity is usually discussed within the context of discovery, rather than creativity, although in everyday parlance the latter two terms are closely related \cite{jordanous12jims}. In the definition of serendipity that we present in Section \ref{sec:our-model}, we make use of Henri Bergson’s distinction:
“Discovery, or uncovering, has to do with what already exists, actually or virtually; it was therefore certain to happen sooner or later. Invention gives being to what did not exist; it might never have happened.” \cite[p. 58]{bergson2010creative}
As we have indicated, serendipity would seem to require features of both discovery and invention: that is, the discovery of something unexpected in the world and the invention of an application for the same. draws on the same Bergsonian distinction to frame her argument about the role of serendipity in artistic practice, where discovery and invention can be seen as ongoing and diverse. This again draws our attention to the relationship between serendipity and creativity.
Following , understands serendipity to describe the case of a person who “stumbles upon something novel and effective when not looking for it.” Nearby categories are blind luck, the luck of the diligent (or pseudoserendipity) and self-induced luck; however, Cropley questions “whether it is a matter of luck at all” because of the work and knowledge involved in the process of assessment. The perspective developed in the current paper sharpens these understandings in two ways: firstly, we point out that work is involved in both phases of the process (even when chance plays a role), and secondly, following Bergson we defer true “novelty” to the invention phase. We can point to process-level parallels between definitions of serendipity like Merton’s, quoted above, and previous definitions of creativity. Csíkszentmihályi’s perspective is particularly suggestive regarding the way in which unanticipated, anomalous, and strategic data might arise and move through a social system:
“[C]reativity results from the interaction of a system composed of three elements: a culture that contains symbolic rules, a person who brings novelty into the symbolic domain, and a field of experts who recognize and validate the innovation.” [emphasis added]
An often-cited five-stage model of creativity, based on preparation, incubation, insight, evaluation, followed by elaboration parallels the model of serendipity that we develop in Section \ref{sec:our-model}. There, we adapt a general-purpose framework for evalutating creative systems \cite{jordanous:12} to use in evaluating a system’s potential for serendipity. These evaluations assume that several relatively generic criteria may be measured. The following section surveys those criteria.