The Serendipity Collective, an initiative to fund the bluest of blue sky technology, has just made its first awards to deliberately unlikely projects. These projects are in a sense ‘useless’ and would not be funded elsewhere, but might just turn out to be world-changers.
Serendipity, from a word meaning a happy accident, is based on the idea that that truly disruptive technologies will create demand which does not yet exist, by offering solutions to problems that humanity has yet to acknowledge or understand. The Serendipity Collective, partly funded by Germany’s Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation (SPRIN-D) and by ONR Global (an extension of the U.S. Navy’s research arm) is ‘application agnostic’ meaning that there does not need to be any specific use for a proposed technology. In essence, they want to encourage happy accidents on purpose.
While most research is conducted with a specific goal, some famous inventions have resulted from researchers fiddling about with projects with no particular purpose. Serendipitous inventions have included Post-It notes, originating from an unsuccessful glue that would not stay stuck, Velcro fastening which came about from a Swiss electrical engineers fascination with why his dog picked up so many burrs and Teflon which came out of research into refrigerants. The Serendipity Collective hopes to recreate that sort of energy deliberately.
The event took place in Berlin in May and saw eight pitches for ideas from Australia, Finland, Germany, Serbia, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain and the USA, as well as discussion and development of ideas. It was facilitated by Swiss consultancy IdeatePlus, with the pitches were shortlisted from 73 submitted via IdeatePlus’ crowdsourcing platform. The event included workshops on “how to weave a story through the ideas and bring them to life,” discussions, ‘ideation’ and creative approaches to evolving new concepts.
The three winners span the range from AI to brainwaves to plant communication.
The Green-G project envisages harnessing the inherent communication ability of plants to create a novel type of information storage and transfer system. Biologists already talk about the ‘wood-wide web’ of interconnected roots which enables trees to communicate with each other. Green-G aims to use engineered plants, with data being stored in their DNA.
Brain-Computer Music Interface (BCMI) will enable two or more people to interact musically via their brainwaves to encourage inter-brain synchronization in real-time. Software will take EEG signals from the participants, filters and decode them and output them in as music in real time. By co-creating music, people may literally become more ‘in tune’ with each other.
Metacognitive Machines will develop a general-purpose computational platform to evolve its own concepts in a controllable manner, at the same time changing how it perceives and reacts to its environment. This will be developed according to a branch of mathematics known as Category Theory and the idea is that by learning to reconfigure itself the device will be a step towards a self-aware AI.
Alongside $50k in funding from the event sponsors, each of the selected projects will also be able to return to the Serendipity Collective for further funding opportunities. Connections with SPRIN-D and other organizations should also provide opportunities for continued development.
The aim is that Serendipity will become a broad-based collective, becoming an annual event and attracting further sponsors and increasing numbers of entrants.
Modern industry tends to be laser-focused on solving specific problems , and even in academia resources tend to go to projects with obvious utility. A study looking at a possible new antibiotic will get a higher priority one focusing on the social behaviour of moles. But this approach gives little space for anything outside a narrow path of development, and means that we risk missing much bigger and more important discoveries that lie outside our wider interests.
Henry Ford is reputed to have said that “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” The motor industry was driven by the push of a new technology, not the pull of the market. The Serendipity Collective believes that creating new and unexpected technologies could open up new vistas.
Can creative tinkering and casual daydreaming really be fostered? Google
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Serendipity, progress through happy accidents, might prove to be a viable strategy – and the Collective is on course to finding out if it is.
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