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Serendipity: It Doesn't Happen by Accident
Hardcover
Business BiographiesBusiness GeneralTechnology & Engineering
ISBN13: 9781068439230
Publisher: C&p
Published: Jun 25 2025
Pages: 336
Weight: 1.18
Height: 0.88 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
Breakthroughs aren't random. They're designed.
In Serendipity: It Doesn't Happen by Accident, David Cleevely - telecoms pioneer, deep tech investor, and architect of the Cambridge tech cluster - shows how the world's most successful ideas often emerge not from rigid plans, but from well-designed networks, environments, and a willingness to embrace the unexpected.
This book reveals how to build those conditions deliberately - whether you're leading a business, shaping public policy, or trying to create spaces where innovation can thrive. Drawing on complexity science, network theory, and decades of experience founding and funding over 60 companies - including the billion-dollar biotech firm Abcam, launched after a single dinner conversation - Cleevely offers a framework for making serendipity not just possible, but probable.
From 18th-century Birmingham to modern-day Cambridge, Silicon Valley, and Shenzhen, he explains how great innovation ecosystems operate - and why many institutions suppress the very dynamics that make discovery likely. You'll explore the three-step rule behind breakthrough environments, uncover why digital platforms can unintentionally reduce serendipity, and learn how a little structured inefficiency may be the secret to real progress.
Whether you're designing a new organisation, reforming an institution, building a startup - or simply trying to make better use of your own time and talent - Serendipity offers a fresh and practical way of thinking about innovation in a world that needs it more than ever.
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