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no idea that he’d end up thinking of it as a geometric problem. Nonetheless, there he stood in 1912 with the idea that gravity was somehow connected to a nonstandard type of geometry. And he was stuck, because such geometric ideas were outside his expertise. He talked his problems over with a long-time mathematician friend, Marcel Grossmann, telling him, “Grossmann, you must help me or else I’ll go crazy!” Fortunately, for Einstein, Grossmann was just the right person to be talking to. He told Einstein that the geometric ideas Einstein needed had already been worked out in full, decades earlier, by the mathematician Bernhard Riemann. Einstein quickly dove into Riemannian geometry, and realized that Grossmann was right. Riemannian geometry became the mathematical language of general relativity.

Serendipitous connections like this are crucial in creative work. In science, especially, every active scientist carries around in their head a host of unsolved problems. Some of those problems are big (“Figure out how the universe began”), some of them are small (“Where’d that damned minus sign disappear in my calculation?”), but all of them are grist for future progress. If you’re a scientist, it’s mostly up to you to solve those problems by yourself. If you’re lucky, you might have a few supportive colleagues who can help you out. Very ocionally, though, you’ll solve a problem in a completely different way. You’ll be talking with an acquaintance, when one of your problems comes up. You’re chatting away when BANG, all of a sudden you realize that this is exactly the right person to be talking to. Sometimes, they can just outright solve your problem. Or sometimes they give you some crucial insight or idea that provides the momentum needed to vanquish the problem. This kind of fortuitous connection is one of the most exciting and important moments in science. The problem is, such chance connections occur too rarely. The reason designed serendipity is important is because in creative work, most of us—even Einstein!—spend much of our time blocked by problems that would be routine, if only we could find the right expert to help us. As recently as 20 years ago, finding that right expert was likely to be difficult. But, as examples such as InnoCentive and Kasparov versus the World show, we can now design systems that make it routine. Designed serendipity enables us to rapidly and routinely solve many of those previously insoluble problems, and so expands the range of our problem-solving ability.

Conversational Critical Mass

It’s challenging to convey the experience of designed serendipity. It’s one thing to describe examples, but it’s quite another thing to be part of a collaboration where designed serendipity is actually going on. All of a sudden, you feel as though your mind has grown wings. You’re liberated from much of the burden of niggling problems, problems that would be routine if only you had access to an expert with just the right skills. It’s profoundly enjoyable to instead spend your time concentrating on the problems where you have a special insight and advantage. Designed serendipity is something that must be experienced to be fully understood. But with that said, there is a simple model that can help explain why designed serendipity is important, and how it can qualitatively change the nature of collaboration. That model is a nuclear chain reaction. By reminding ourselves of what happens during a chain reaction we will gain insight into why designed serendipity is important.

The way a chain reaction works is simple. Imagine you have somehow come into possession of a small piece of uranium—uranium-235, the type of uranium that goes into nuclear bombs. (There are several types of uranium, but they don’t all undergo nuclear chain reactions. From now on, when I say “uranium” I mean uranium-235.) Uranium atoms, it turns out, aren’t very stable. Every once in a while, the nucleus of a uranium atom will disintegrate, spitting out one or more neutrons. That neutron then flies off through the piece of uranium. Uranium, like