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"Serendipity."
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Gods without men
Jaz and Lisa Matharu are plunged into a surreal public hell after their son, Raj, vanishes during a family vacation in the California desert. However, the Mojave is a place of strange power, and before Raj reappears inexplicably unharmed--but not unchanged--the fate of this young family will intersect with that of many others, echoing the stories of all those who have traveled before them. Driven by the energy and cunning of Coyote, the mythic, shape-shifting trickster, Gods Without Men is full of big ideas, but centered on flesh-and-blood characters who converge at an odd, remote town in the shadow of a rock formation called the Pinnacles. Viscerally gripping and intellectually engaging, it is, above all, a heartfelt exploration of the search for pattern and meaning in a chaotic universe.
BOOK
How Do Serial Acquirers Realize Serendipitous Value in Technology Acquisitions?
The acquisition of technology organizations is being undertaken by a wide range of both technology and non-technology firms to provide strategic renewal, bring products to market more quickly, scale existing technology through larger sales channels, and sometimes even acquire key teams and valuable team members. While much existing M&A research focuses on how integration teams can deliver planned benefits intended by the acquirer (often cost-related), there are also mentions of serendipitous value available with technology acquisitions that can be delivered during the integration phase. We know that this unplanned value delivered post-deal is available to acquirers and can be significant, but we do not know why some deals realize it and others do not. Drawing on a multi-case, inductive study of seven acquisitions of small and mid-sized technology companies by three different large serial acquirers, this project surfaces processes used by integration teams to identify and realize this serendipitous value. The project delves into the acquisition experiences of the team members that executed the integration to 1) learn about how the codification of past integration experiences was used to guide integration, 2) how stakeholders were managed, and 3) how the emotions of the acquired team were managed, all with an eye toward learning about the unplanned value delivered during the integration. [17] This thesis document details the research project that was executed and includes three academic journal articles, one for each of the three topics, grounded in both academic literature and practitioner experiences to further knowledge about these topics. In addition, the project includes a section with thoughts for practitioners grounded in the experiences of the cases that may help acquirers expand deal value from their M&A. This research project and its articles contribute to the M&A strategy literature.
Dissertation
Serendipity : fortune and the prepared mind
\"Since 1986 Darwin College, Cambridge has organised a series of annual public lectures built around a single theme approached in a multi-disciplinary way. These essays were developed from the 2008 lectures, which explored the idea of serendipity - the relationship between good fortune and the preparation of the mind to spot and exploit it. Serendipity is an appealing concept, and one which has been surprisingly influential in a great number of areas of human discovery. The essays collected in this volume provide insightful and entertaining accounts of the relationship between serendipity and knowledge, in the human and natural sciences. Written by some of the most eminent thinkers of this generation, Serendipity explores a variety of subjects, including disease, politics, scientific invention and the art of writing. This collection will fascinate and inspire a wide range of readers, highlighting the multifaceted nature of the popular, but elusive, concept of serendipity\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Citizen science frontiers
Citizen science has proved to be a unique and effective tool in helping science and society cope with the ever-growing data rates and volumes that characterize the modern research landscape. It also serves a critical role in engaging the public with research in a direct, authentic fashion and by doing so promotes a better understanding of the processes of science. To take full advantage of the onslaught of data being experienced across the disciplines, it is essential that citizen science platforms leverage the complementary strengths of humans and machines. This Perspectives piece explores the issues encountered in designing human–machine systems optimized for both efficiency and volunteer engagement, while striving to safeguard and encourage opportunities for serendipitous discovery. We discuss case studies from Zooniverse, a large online citizen science platform, and show that combining human and machine classifications can efficiently produce results superior to those of either one alone and how smart task allocation can lead to further efficiencies in the system. While these examples make clear the promise of human–machine integration within an online citizen science system, we then explore in detail how system design choices can inadvertently lower volunteer engagement, create exclusionary practices, and reduce opportunity for serendipitous discovery. Throughout we investigate the tensions that arise when designing a human–machine system serving the dual goals of carrying out research in the most efficient manner possible while empowering a broad community to authentically engage in this research.
Journal Article
The efficiency paradox : what big data can't do
\"A bold challenge to our obsession with efficiency--and a new understanding of how to benefit from the powerful potential of serendipity\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The prepared firm: serendipity, strategy and the unexpected
Purpose
This paper aims to outline the role that serendipity can play in providing a complementary and previously unrepresented vector in deliberate and emergent strategies within organizations.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper is conceptual in nature and draws upon the serendipity pattern in sociological theory and serendipitous relations in developmental sciences to provide a framework for executives to consider when examining the process of strategy formation. Two case vignettes are used to illustrate the difference between luck and serendipity and the paper also traces key micro foundations of serendipity by returning to the original serendipity fable and a famed science experiment producing “floppy-eared” rabbits.
Findings
The notion of chance favoring the “prepared firm” is espoused where the prepared organizational mind is positioned as an antecedent of serendipitous strategy formation. This is based on Louis Pasteur’s famous aphorism, “chance favors the prepared mind.” Components of the prepared firm include deep domain knowledge, anticipatory mindset, noticing, abductive reasoning, elaboration and relations development.
Research limitations/implications
The paper is a conceptual articulation of a novel concept that now requires deeper empirical case development and ultimately statistical validation. The paper suggests linkages between serendipity and theories of absorptive capacity and the attention-based view of the firm.
Practical implications
Several mindsets, capabilities and relations for architecting organizational serendipity are suggested for executives using a stylized framework.
Originality/value
From a strategy process perspective, the Mintzberg and Waters seminal article “Of strategies deliberate and emergent” is complemented by considering “floppy-eared” strategy characterized by unexpected, anomalous and strategic datum.
Journal Article
Researching serendipity in digital information environments
Chance, luck, and good fortune are the usual go-to descriptors of serendipity, a phenomenon aptly often coupled with famous anecdotes of accidental discoveries in engineering and science in modern history such as penicillin, Teflon, and Post-it notes. Serendipity, however, is evident in many fields of research, in organizations, in everyday life--and there is more to it than luck implies. While the phenomenon is strongly associated with in-person interactions with people, places, and things, most attention of late has focused on its preservation and facilitation within digital information environments. Serendipity's association with unexpected, positive user experiences and outcomes has spurred an interest in understanding both how current digital information environments support serendipity and how novel approaches may be developed to facilitate it. Research has sought to understand serendipity, how it is manifested in people's personality traits and behaviors, how it may be facilitated in digital information environments such as mobile applications, and its impacts on an individual, an organizational, and a wider level. Because serendipity is expressed and understood in different ways in different contexts, multiple methods have been used to study the phenomenon and evaluate digital information environments that may support it. This volume brings together different disciplinary perspectives and examines the motivations for studying serendipity, the various ways in which serendipity has been approached in the research, methodological approaches to build theory, and how it may be facilitated. Finally, a roadmap for serendipity research is drawn by integrating key points from this volume to produce a framework for the examination of serendipity in digital information environments.
Book
User Personality and User Satisfaction with Recommender Systems
In this study, we show that individual users’ preferences for the level of diversity, popularity, and serendipity in recommendation lists cannot be inferred from their ratings alone. We demonstrate that we can extract strong signals about individual preferences for recommendation diversity, popularity and serendipity by measuring their personality traits. We conducted an online experiment with over 1,800 users for six months on a live recommendation system. In this experiment, we asked users to evaluate a list of movie recommendations with different levels of diversity, popularity, and serendipity. Then, we assessed users’ personality traits using the Ten-item Personality Inventory (TIPI). We found that ratings-based recommender systems may often fail to deliver preferred levels of diversity, popularity, and serendipity for their users (e.g. users with high-serendipity preferences). We also found that users with different personalities have different preferences for these three recommendation properties. Our work suggests that we can improve user satisfaction when we integrate users’ personality traits into the process of generating recommendations.
Journal Article
The kind worth killing
\"A dark ... suspense novel about a random encounter, sex, and a conversation that quickly turns to murder--a modern reimagining of Patricia Highsmith's classic Strangers on a train--from the author of The girl with a clock for a heart\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Normal, dust-obscured galaxies in the epoch of reionization
Over the past decades, rest-frame ultraviolet (UV) observations have provided large samples of UV luminous galaxies at redshift (
z
) greater than 6 (refs.
1
–
3
), during the so-called epoch of reionization. While a few of these UV-identified galaxies revealed substantial dust reservoirs
4
–
7
, very heavily dust-obscured sources at these early times have remained elusive. They are limited to a rare population of extreme starburst galaxies
8
–
12
and companions of rare quasars
13
,
14
. These studies conclude that the contribution of dust-obscured galaxies to the cosmic star formation rate density at
z
> 6 is sub-dominant. Recent ALMA and Spitzer observations have identified a more abundant, less extreme population of obscured galaxies at
z
= 3−6 (refs.
15
,
16
). However, this population has not been confirmed in the reionization epoch so far. Here, we report the discovery of two dust-obscured star-forming galaxies at
z
= 6.6813 ± 0.0005 and
z
= 7.3521 ± 0.0005. These objects are not detected in existing rest-frame UV data and were discovered only through their far-infrared [C
ii
] lines and dust continuum emission as companions to typical UV-luminous galaxies at the same redshift. The two galaxies exhibit lower infrared luminosities and star-formation rates than extreme starbursts, in line with typical star-forming galaxies at
z
≈ 7. This population of heavily dust-obscured galaxies appears to contribute 10–25% to the
z
> 6 cosmic star formation rate density.
Two serendipitously detected dust-obscured galaxies are reported at
z
= 6.7 and 7.4, with estimates that such galaxies provide an additional 10–25% contribution to the total star formation rate density at
z
> 6.
Journal Article