# Designed Serendipity # Designed Serendipity This approach to [[§Augmented Knowledge Generation]] is focused on how to most effectively deploy expert attention. Expert [[Attention is the ultimate scarce resource]] and ideally you would be able to talk to the relevant expert at the exact moment you need to and they could spend 10 minutes explaining something that would have taken you hours to figure out. If you accept the idea that for [[Discrete technology improvements (quantum leaps)]], [[New ideas need to come out of a single mind]] this is the approach with the most upside. It’s also the fuzziest. In a way, [[§Multidisciplinary Teams]] are a ham-fisted attempt to create designed serendipity. ### Case Studies * [[Innocentive]] is a marketplace where companies can post challenges * It’s at TRL 9 but with many constraints * The [[Polymath Project]] hinted that it was possible for experts to coordinate better than the traditional way * TRL 3 * Open source software projects (Linux, Firefiox) and wikipedia are the gold standard for designed serendipity * TRL 9 * The [[Polyplexus]] project is attempting to make it easier to encode ideas and find the people with relevant ideas. * TRL 4/5? * [[A system that encoded papers as problems and solutions and then surfaced the papers and associated researchers based on the problem you had]] * TRL 2/3 * There are many attempts to surface relevant researchers (Google Scholar, Orchid) but without additional information it’s not that much more useful than just emailing people who appear to have written relevant papers. ### Principles/Elements of Success Some pieces that you see consistently in more successful projects * [[Successful approaches to designed serendipity focus on small information quanta]] ### Challenges * Getting enough of a shared context between two people so that they can come up with new ideas often takes a lot of time and patience. * There’s no way to set prices in a knowledge marketplace * [[How do you structure attention so that you connect to the right microexpertise at the right time?]] ### Possible Opportunities * Twitter may be underutilized as a designed serendipity platform. ### Related * Designed serendipity is almost a subset of [[Expertise Finding (wikipedia)]] that needs to happen as real time as possible and with as little friction as possible. ### References * The term originally came from [[Michael Nielsen characterizes institution building as making previously illegible things legible]] in [[Reinventing Discovery]] where he paints a vision for an ‘attention marketplace’ and describes many case studies. * [[Can Twitter Save Science?]] makes the argument that Twitter might be the correct platform for designed serendipity. <!-- #evergreen --> [Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Designed+Serendipity) [Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Designed+Serendipity)