Towards a Theory of Serendipity: A Systematic Review and Conceptualization
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Serendipity – the notion of making surprising and valuable discoveries – plays a major role in the success of individuals and organizations alike. Previous research has established the importance of serendipity and identified important individual‐ and organizational‐level antecedents. However, the literature has been dispersed and the boundaries of the concept have been blurry, leading to a lack of conceptual clarity and structure, and thus limiting validity and managerial actionability. Based on a systematic literature review, I synthesize existing management‐related research on serendipity and explicate the emergence and composition of serendipity in the organizational context. I first identify three necessary conditions that differentiate serendipity from related concepts such as luck or targeted innovation: agency, surprise , and value . Then, I draw from the literature on sensemaking, event‐based theorizing, and quantum‐based approaches to management to conceptualize the process of cultivating serendipity in the organizational context as a process of enabling potentiality and materialization , and develop a multi‐level theory of (cultivating) serendipity. This conceptualization contributes to our collective understanding of how, why, and when (i.e., under what conditions) organizations can leverage the value in the unexpected, which opens up fruitful avenues for further research.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it