num_pages: 77
description: The notion of serendipity is not new to business thinking. Theimportance of unexpected conversations and knowledge exchangein innovation has been noted in the management literature formany years. What is new is actually building a business –a machine – that systematically facilitates serendipity. This book presents a disruptive business model that allows you to do exactlythat. It is based on a study of Seats2meet.com, the Dutch networkof physical coworking, office and meeting spaces. By reinventing social capital as the currency of network culture andfusing it with the phenomenon of serendipity, Seats2meet.com hascreated a serendipity machine that increasingly looks like anappropriate platform for value creation in a network economy,fusing traditional monetary capital with social capital. It haseffectively put into practice something academics have beenfeverishly looking for for the last two decades. And the key to it allis serendipity.Seats2meet.com has created a business model that providesa platform for the digital bohemians, knowmads, free agents, orindependent professionals as well as corporate nomads to unleashtheir creative powers. By co-creating the infrastructure today’screative revolution needs in order to crystallize, Seats2meet.comhas projected itself into the future of capitalism. Creativerevolution has become the company’s business. It can becomeyours as well!Sebastian Olma, PhD, is an international scholar and expertworking at the interface between creativity and economy. Trainedas a philosopher as well as an organizational economist, he helpscompanies and organizations to effectively and sustainably makethe most of their innovative potential. He lives in Amsterdam,where he divides his professional time between running hisconsulting company, The Think Tank (thethinktank.nl), andcodirecting the Creative Industries Research Centre Amsterdam atthe University of Amsterdam.Yulia Kryazheva is an architect and researcher, has worked ona diverse range of projects in the areas of architecture and urbanrenewal, service design and illustration, creative consulting. Thispractice gave shape to her current professional domain: designthinking &amp; visual communication. From her studio, Yulia Ink(yulia-ink.com) in Rotterdam, she works for clients all over Europe.B. Joseph Pine II is an internationally acclaimed author, speaker, andmanagement advisor to Fortune 500 companies and entrepreneurialstart-ups alike. Mr. Pine co-founded Strategic Horizons LLP,a thinking studio dedicated to helping businesses conceive anddesign new ways of adding value to their economic offerings.A prolific writer, in 2011 he updated his best-sellingThe Experience Economy (with Jim Gilmore) and co-wrote InfinitePossibility: Creating Customer Value on the Digital Frontier (withKim Korn).AcknowledgmentsTo collect data for our research, we traveled to many of themore than 70 Seats2meet.com locations in the Netherlands inMay and June 2012. We would like to take the opportunity tothank everyone who was kind enough to participate in ourinterviews and share their experience of Seats2meet.com withus – above all, the users of the workspaces, the bookers of themeeting spaces, the Seats2meet.com entrepreneurs and thestaff. Thanks to Seats2meet.
language: English
title: The Serendipity Machine
publisher: Stichting Society 3.0