Serendipity Science

Serendipity is fundamental to science. This quirky and intriguing phenomenon permeates across scientific disciplines, including the medical sciences, psychological sciences, management and organizational sciences, innovation science, philosophy and library and information sciences. Why is it so ubiquitous? Because of what it facilitates and catalyzes: scientific discoveries from velcro to Viagra, innovation of all forms, unexpected encounters of useful information, novel and important ideas, and deep reflection on how we, as individuals, organizations, communities and societies can take leaps forwards by seizing unexpected opportunities and ‘making our own luck.

Serendipity in Entrepreneurship, Strategy, and Innovation—A Review and Conceptualisation

Serendipity is at the core of many innovationsInnovation, inventions, and entrepreneurial opportunities. However, despite its importance for organisations and individuals alike, research on the dimensions and antecedents of serendipity is surprisingly scarce. In this chapter, Christian Busch and Matthew Grimes review and synthesize research on serendipity in the entrepreneurshipEntrepreneurship, strategyStrategy, and innovationInnovation context, and suggest a novel conceptualisation of the processProcess of (cultivating) serendipity. They thereby provide the reader with a thorough and wide-ranging view of how serendipity has come into the fore in the field of organization and management, but also what possibilities it opens up for understanding and creating the conditionsConditions for entrepreneurial success. They advance a processProcess-oriented model of serendipity that serves as a basis to elaborate factors that increase the chancesChance for serendipitous encounters and how to capitalize on them. Amongst those, Busch and Grimes distinguish between individual (including reframing, extrovertedness and perseverance) and organizational factors (including systematic evaluations, iteration and team-based collaboration). Their paper, thereby, advances the conceptual understanding of serendipity as much as a theory of how to transfer this understanding successfully into the entrepreneurial context

Responsible innovation as a driver of regional policies and innovation and entrepreneurial practices: The context of digitalisation of healthcare and welfare services

This thesis explores the concept of responsible innovation (RI) and its implications for regional policies, innovation, and entrepreneurship policies and practices in the context of healthcare and welfare services. RI is a concept that emerged in the wake of widening grand societal challenges and is developing and spreading quickly to govern research and innovation on society’s needs, values, and expectations. RI emphasises the reflection of purpose, process, and outcomes of innovation and entrepreneurship policies and practices such that they contribute to addressing grand societal challenges and create a broader societal impact. There is a growing belief that RI dimensions of inclusion, anticipation, reflexivity, and responsiveness can offer a valuable tool. Thus, RI practices could enable policymakers, firms, and stakeholders within the regional innovation ecosystem to interact to address grand societal challenges. However, RI has stalled at articulating a governance process with a strongly normative loading without clear, practical guidelines for implementation strategies and mainly concentrated on publicly funded research projects. RI scholars argued that RI and its aspiration could only be achieved if integrated into policies and practices. Furthermore, because firms and the private sector are the primary drivers of innovation, they need to acknowledge the significance of RI practices in innovation and business practices. However, most firms and policymakers are either unaware of RI or find implementing RI in research, innovation, and entrepreneurship policies and practices challenging. Furthermore, RI emphasises the inclusion of micro, meso, and macro levels of stakeholders in the innovation ecosystem for desirable, sustainable, and responsible innovative outcomes and broader impact. However, existing theoretical frameworks do not fully account for whether, how, and why firms adapt and practice RI in innovation and entrepreneurship. Thus, given that firms are embedded in the regional context, there is a need to understand RI and its role in shaping the purpose, process, and outcomes of innovation and entrepreneurial policies and activities to achieve overall regional goals. This thesis addresses these problems in the context of healthcare and welfare services, which are under immense pressure to ensure accessible, equitable, and sustainable services, primarily due to demographic and ecological changes. The emerging digitalisation and innovation in digital technology bring several potentials to address societal challenges, including healthcare and welfare service challenges. However, digital innovation might also raise privacy, safety, and security issues. RI can play a vital role in addressing these issues and drive research and innovation to benefit society. The empirical setting is the context of digital innovation in healthcare and welfare services, particularly in the Western region of Norway. This region established the Norwegian Smart Care Cluster (NSCC) in 2013 to promote digital healthcare and welfare provisions to citizens and contribute to regional and national economic growth. The cluster comprises approximately 290 organizations, including 194 private firms working on digital innovations in healthcare and welfare services. This thesis employs a qualitative approach with two different research designs between Paper I and Papers II, III, and IV. It utilizes empirical data collected from the nine firms belonging to the NSCC and the diverse set of stakeholders, including the cluster administration, university researchers, municipality representatives responsible for procurement and implementation of health and welfare services, healthcare professionals, and regional politicians. Paper I is a systematic literature review based on peer-reviewed journals. Papers II, III, and IV are case studies conducted using semi-structured interviews and secondary data gathered from various sources. The case studies and data gathered in this thesis take an exploratory approach. The approach is split between multiple case studies in Papers II and III and a single case study in Paper IV. The four research papers together answer the overarching research inquiry, ‘How does the RI approach facilitate regional policies and innovation and entrepreneurship practices in firms toward increased societal impact?’ The individual research papers apply different theoretical perspectives together with RI. In so doing, the thesis contributes to theory, practice, and policy in RI, innovation, and entrepreneurship

Human cognitive performance: a neurophysiological assessment of the impact that reverse assessment priming has on mental workload, performance and cognitive efficiency during transient information processing

This study assessed cognitive efficiency (CE) during transient information processing by capturing the neural activity experienced during the completion of varying levels of cognitive processing. The study researched the impact of low versus high cognitive demand on transient information and the effect that reverse assessment priming has on overall neural activity, and the correlations of mental workload (MWL) with performance and with CE. In total, 13 university students and staff members from the University of Southern Queensland participated in both low and high cognitive demand level experiments. Experiment 1 consisted of a low level transient information processing task and Experiment 2 involved a high level transient information task. All participants completed both control intervals and test intervals for both experiments. Test intervals included the provision of a reverse assessment priming strategy prior to the presentation of the Transient Information Processing Task (TIPT) stimuli. All students were asked to complete a handiness, demographic, general health and prior knowledge questionnaire to enable consistency across the experimental groups. Students were matched and presented with a TIPT whereby they were deemed to have no or very minimal prior exposure to and knowledge of the topic. The TIPTs presented were either two minutes or four minutes in duration and were in auditory format. Topics were made up of an even mix of animals and countries. The study aimed to analyze the CE further; this was achieved by the students completing a written multiple choice assessment immediately following each TIPT. Results highlighted the extent to which working memory capacity depletes as the complexity of transient information increases. Whilst the assessment results demonstrated the students’ working memory ability to process transient information, the procedure is difficult by nature owing to the inability of information to be decoded, processed and encoded without an opportunity to review and transfer it into a more permanent state or to link it to previous schematic networks. Results emphasised the impact and benefit of using the reverse assessment priming strategy in reducing the cognitive demand placed on an individual by the MWL experienced so that human performance scores were augmented along with an increase in CE during transient information processing. This study provides objective evidence that the MWL from a neurophysiological measure differs between a low cognitive demanding TIPT and a high cognitive demanding TIPT in both settings where subjects completed the low and high TIPT (control) tasks and the low and high TIPT reverse assessment processing stimuli (RAPS) (test) tasks. This enables an insight into the degree to which brain activity responds to a change in stimuli and, in particular, transient information whereby the individual is unable to make a more permanent record or has control over the speed or mode in which the information is presented in order to process the incoming information within working memory. The duration of each stimulus was what differentiated the low cognitive demanding task and the high cognitive demanding task; therefore results indicate that the longer that an individual attempts to process continually presented transient information, the more MWL increases. The neural activity increased in 91% of subjects between the low and high TIPT (control) tasks and 75% of subjects between the low and high RAPS (test) tasks. Results indicated that the use of RAPS has a minimal impact on the MWL imposed during a low cognitive demanding TIPT. However, the use of RAPS can prove to be an effective strategy in reducing the MWL experienced during a high cognitive demanding TIPT. RAPS had a minimal effect on the low cognitive demanding tasks, although as the level of the task complexity increased so too did the positive impact of using RAPS. It has been established that the use of RAPS is an effective strategy to reduce MLW during a TIPT; in this study it resulted in a decrease of up to 34.64% in MWL. The results of this study indicated that the use of RAPS resulted in a positive impact on the performance results achieved across both low and high level TIPTs in all possible situations. The study outcomes demonstrated that in 100% of subjects an increase was achieved in the human performance between the low TIPT (control) and low TIPT RAPS (test) tasks, recording an increase of up to 40% in performance scores achieved. Similarly, during the high TIPT (control) and high TIPT RAPS (test) intervals, wherever an increase was possible, 100% of situations experienced an increase in performance scores of up to 80%. The findings demonstrated that the use of RAPS had a positive impact on, and promoted an increase in, the CE that can be achieved during a TIPT. This discovery plays an important role in the overall wellbeing of human capital; the emphasis placed on human performance should no longer be at an individual’s expense. Human performance practices can utilise these findings to allow a balanced metric and enable a change in mind set from an outdated human performance paradigm to a truly human centered approach that considers the person’s cognitive capacity. CE has been increased as a result of using RAPS, demonstrating an 8% increase in subjects achieving an above average >0 CE score between the control and test intervals. This result supported the argument that RAPS had a positive impact on the overall CE achieved during a TIPT