The launch of Serendipity: It Doesn\u2019t Happen by Accident by Dr David Cleevely took place at The Glasshouse, in Botanic House last week, with 100 attendees enjoying an occasion which no doubt itself generated scores of serendipitous meetings.<\/p>\n
Serendipity is a self-published exploration of how innovation happens, and how to make it happen more.<\/p>\n
David Cleevely at Botanic House for the launch of ‘Serendipity: It Doesn\u2019t Happen by Accident’. Picture: Keith Heppell<\/p>\n
The following day David \u2013 one of Cambridge\u2019s most successful-ever entrepreneurs and guiding lights \u2013 is in ebullient spirits, his enthusiasm for discovery and progress clearly undimmed.<\/p>\n
Did Serendipity take long to write?<\/p>\n
\u201cIt took an entire lifetime to write!\u201d David says happily. \u201cBut once I decided to get on with it, it took 15 months.\u201d<\/p>\n
And what was the motivation to devote himself to such a lengthy process?<\/p>\n
\u201cThree reasons,\u201d he replies. \u201cFirstly I want people who are wrestling really hard with the question of \u2018how does the UK get back to growth?\u2019 to look at this book and say \u2018there\u2019s stuff in here that can really help us\u2019.<\/p>\n
\u201cSecondly, to raise enough questions for people who want to do some research in this area and find out how does this [business success] really work because in a sense engineers get the goodies from the scientists and I\u2019m an engineer. I want the scientists to tell me how I can organise things \u2013 I can guess, but I need the evidence, I need some real data.<\/p>\n
The launch of David Cleevely’s book, Serendipity: It Doesn’t Happen by Accident at Innovate Cambridge\u2019s Glasshouse Picture: Keith Heppell<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd then [thirdly] there\u2019s the general appeal to companies or other organisations to think not about just bringing their workers back into little battery hen boxes, but to think about how you really make this hum and how you make people\u2019s lives better.\u201d<\/p>\n
He adds: \u201cThe basic problem is we\u2019re all under this cosh and it\u2019s squeezing out how to make things really work.<\/p>\n
\u201cI joke about how if you want to kill a company, put your finance director in charge and just do everything to maximise profits. You\u2019re going to kill it. You don\u2019t know what the future is going to be, you don\u2019t know where these ideas are going to come from, and if you act in a way to reduce all your options and don\u2019t encounter people and don\u2019t have free-flowing conversations then that failure is built in.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat kind of diversity, which is under attack on the other side of the Atlantic, is really what makes things work.\u201d<\/p>\n
I mention that I\u2019m in the Bradfield Centre<\/a> for our video call. Is the Bradfield the right sort of setting \u2013 the right sort of architecture \u2013 to foster serendipity?<\/p>\n \u201cWell yes, that\u2019s in the book,\u201d replies David. \u201cIn fact when Rory Landman was the bursar of Trinity [2006-2021] I attended three meetings with him to help design the Bradfield Centre \u2013 precisely how it could be designed so as to maximise serendipity.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I say \u2018helped in the design\u2019 basically these were meetings to talk about how we felt that the chance encounters happen and how you could engineer those in a space, without getting into the detail of the design. I was really pleased when I saw the design because it took all those things into account.<\/p>\n \u201cBut it is the water cooler moment. When you walk into the Bradfield Centre you can see everything. If someone is standing a long way away you will spot them, so the chances of bumping into people is hugely increased. That physical spatial design is incredibly important.\u201d<\/p>\n To be sure, David\u2019s career has been turbocharged by serendipity. His careers master saw him in a corridor and persuaded him to go into a Post Office presentation which was short of an audience, and he ended up being sponsored by Post Office Telecommunications to study cybernetics at Reading. After stints at Post Office Telecomms and the Economist Intelligence Unit, he founded the consultancy Analysys in 1985. Soon enough this brought him to Cambridge, and in the 1990s he co-founded Cambridge Network after meeting Sir Alec Broers and Hermann Hauser at a Wolfson College dinner, Cambridge Wireless after meeting Edward Astle in a coffee shop, Cambridge Angels after meeting Robert Sansom at a \u2018meet the neighbours\u2019 event and Abcam after meeting Jonathan Milner<\/a> at a dinner in 1998.<\/p>\n \u201cWith Abcam I sat down at this dinner with Jonathan \u2013 I\u2019d not met him before \u2013 and I found out about him,\u201d David recalls. \u201cAnother thing about serendipity is you\u2019ve got to find out about the background which reveals stuff you didn\u2019t know, you reveal stuff they didn\u2019t know, and there\u2019s a crossover.<\/p>\n \u201cJonathan was doing research and was fed up with the antibody suppliers. He was thinking about starting a goat farm so he could make antibodies and use the web to sell them, which was the important thing.<\/p>\n \u201cThe business model didn\u2019t exist until I went through with him at the dinner how this would actually work. How would you do it? And funnily enough the calculation I made over that dinner about the unit cost of antibodies was pretty much exactly where we ended up with Abcam five years later.\u201d<\/p>\n Cleevely was chairman at Abcam until 2009. He subsequently broadened his activities, becoming the founding director of the Centre for Science and Policy and then chair of the Advisory Council (stepping down in 2018) and (unremunerated) chairman of Raspberry Pi in 2014 (until 2019).<\/p>\n His public policy work<\/a> has included contributing, in 2015, to the UK government-backed Visions of Cambridge 2065 report which predicted dramatic changes in the city over the coming 50 years. Fast forward to 2025, and David\u2019s main business focus, other than chairing Focal Point Positioning<\/a>, is on two companies \u2013 AI Vivo, which is based at the Bioinnovation Centre on Cambridge Science Park, and Glasgow-based Chemify.<\/p>\n \u201cAI Vivo is using three bits of information \u2013 the genome of the pathogen, the drug you might want to apply and the cell pathway, and then it\u2019s using AI to explore all those so that you can identify new potential drugs against diseases.\u201d<\/p>\n There was serendipity involved, of course. But it was an unusual example of the genre. AI Vivo\u2019s science was developing nicely \u2013 and then Covid struck.<\/p>\n \u201cWe were very exercised about it and managed to get hold of bits of the Covid genome,\u201d David says. \u201cBy April 2020 AI Vivo had published a list of the top 50 drugs that would be useful against Covid. Of course we were coming out of nowhere and were largely ignored, but if you go back and look at that list, it\u2019s right.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019d looked at 5,000 drugs and the 50 we came up with were good candidates, and the top 10 are used on a regular basis to treat Covid. And by the way how did I come across AI Vivo? It was a chance meeting when I was introduced to somebody at Queens\u2019 College. But that\u2019s Cambridge for you \u2013 and that\u2019s why I wrote the book.\u201d<\/p>\n You could be forgiven for thinking that Cambridge is the Mecca of serendipity, but there are other places too: Chemify, for instance, is a spin-out from the University of Glasgow.<\/p>\n \u201cThat has a universal machine that will make you any molecule. We\u2019ve just built the first \u2018chemifarm\u2019, which is the first factory where you have dozens of these machines working 24\/7, operated by computers searching for interesting combinations of atoms that you can then turn into potential drugs that will then change everybody\u2019s lives.<\/p>\n \u201cIn the chemical space, just if you think about molecules, it\u2019s an enormous thing. I mean, it\u2019s far bigger than the universe.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2018Bigger than the universe\u2019… My brain is whirring frantically. Is that because those spaces, and those molecules, don\u2019t actually exist in the physical universe, but they do all exist in a theoretical realm that could become a reality, I ask?<\/p>\n \u201cYes, that\u2019s right,\u201d says David after a micro-pause. \u201cIt\u2019s complicated because while AI might suggest a molecule to you, you can\u2019t necessarily make it. You\u2019ve got to have a pathway to go from the lab to make something, and if you can\u2019t do it, it\u2019s inaccessible.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you\u2019re doing chemistry with people \u2013 even if you\u2019ve got bits of robots to help you, there are still people \u2013 you\u2019re going to be limited as to how much you can do, but if you automate it, and apply machine learning and AI to it, you can do this kind of reinforced loop that enables you to start exploring with the assistance of AI.\u201d<\/p>\n In 2023 Chemify announced the completion of \u00a336m funding. Nobel Prize winner Sir Fraser Stoddart said: \u201cI see Chemify as a major development for the field of chemistry.\u201d<\/p>\n So what is the thread that links the young man who worked for the Post Office to the stand-out innovator \u2013 only Hermann Hauser and Jonathan Milner come close in terms of spotting and nurturing winners \u2013 of one of the world\u2019s great innovation hubs?<\/p>\n \u201cI think it is that I\u2019m genuinely excited by new ideas. Innovation really fires me up, then I want to make it work and it doesn\u2019t really matter then what the subject is. The principle of doing something really innovative, that\u2019s the fun bit.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s almost as if he doesn\u2019t just encounter serendipity, he manufactures it.<\/p>\nThe launch of David Cleevely’s book, ‘Serendipity – It Doesn’t Happen by Accident’. Picture: Keith Heppell<\/p>\n
The launch of David Cleevely’s book, ‘Serendipity – It doesn’t happen by accident’. Picture: Keith Heppell<\/p>\n
Dr Cleevely receiving an honorary doctorate at ARUPicture: davidjohnson photographic.co.uk<\/p>\n