Cambridge legend David Cleevely and how ‘Serendipity’ is not just a book – it’s a way of life
The launch of Serendipity: It Doesn’t 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.
Serendipity is a self-published exploration of how innovation happens, and how to make it happen more.
The following day David – one of Cambridge’s most successful-ever entrepreneurs and guiding lights – is in ebullient spirits, his enthusiasm for discovery and progress clearly undimmed.
Did Serendipity take long to write?
“It took an entire lifetime to write!” David says happily. “But once I decided to get on with it, it took 15 months.”
And what was the motivation to devote himself to such a lengthy process?
“Three reasons,” he replies. “Firstly I want people who are wrestling really hard with the question of ‘how does the UK get back to growth?’ to look at this book and say ‘there’s stuff in here that can really help us’.
“Secondly, 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’m an engineer. I want the scientists to tell me how I can organise things – I can guess, but I need the evidence, I need some real data.
“And then [thirdly] there’s 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’s lives better.”
He adds: “The basic problem is we’re all under this cosh and it’s squeezing out how to make things really work.
“I joke about how if you want to kill a company, put your finance director in charge and just do everything to maximise profits. You’re going to kill it. You don’t know what the future is going to be, you don’t know where these ideas are going to come from, and if you act in a way to reduce all your options and don’t encounter people and don’t have free-flowing conversations then that failure is built in.
“That kind of diversity, which is under attack on the other side of the Atlantic, is really what makes things work.”
I mention that I’m in the Bradfield Centre for our video call. Is the Bradfield the right sort of setting – the right sort of architecture – to foster serendipity?
“Well yes, that’s in the book,” replies David. “In fact when Rory Landman was the bursar of Trinity [2006-2021] I attended three meetings with him to help design the Bradfield Centre – precisely how it could be designed so as to maximise serendipity.
“When I say ‘helped in the design’ 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.
“But 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.”
To be sure, David’s 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 ‘meet the neighbours’ event and Abcam after meeting Jonathan Milner at a dinner in 1998.
“With Abcam I sat down at this dinner with Jonathan – I’d not met him before – and I found out about him,” David recalls. “Another thing about serendipity is you’ve got to find out about the background which reveals stuff you didn’t know, you reveal stuff they didn’t know, and there’s a crossover.
“Jonathan 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.
“The business model didn’t 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.”
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).
His public policy work 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’s main business focus, other than chairing Focal Point Positioning, is on two companies – AI Vivo, which is based at the Bioinnovation Centre on Cambridge Science Park, and Glasgow-based Chemify.
“AI Vivo is using three bits of information – the genome of the pathogen, the drug you might want to apply and the cell pathway, and then it’s using AI to explore all those so that you can identify new potential drugs against diseases.”
There was serendipity involved, of course. But it was an unusual example of the genre. AI Vivo’s science was developing nicely – and then Covid struck.
“We were very exercised about it and managed to get hold of bits of the Covid genome,” David says. “By 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’s right.
“We’d 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’ College. But that’s Cambridge for you – and that’s why I wrote the book.”
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.
“That has a universal machine that will make you any molecule. We’ve just built the first ‘chemifarm’, 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’s lives.
“In the chemical space, just if you think about molecules, it’s an enormous thing. I mean, it’s far bigger than the universe.”
‘Bigger than the universe’... My brain is whirring frantically. Is that because those spaces, and those molecules, don’t actually exist in the physical universe, but they do all exist in a theoretical realm that could become a reality, I ask?
“Yes, that’s right,” says David after a micro-pause. “It’s complicated because while AI might suggest a molecule to you, you can’t necessarily make it. You’ve got to have a pathway to go from the lab to make something, and if you can’t do it, it’s inaccessible.
“When you’re doing chemistry with people – even if you’ve got bits of robots to help you, there are still people – you’re 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.”
In 2023 Chemify announced the completion of £36m funding. Nobel Prize winner Sir Fraser Stoddart said: “I see Chemify as a major development for the field of chemistry.”
So what is the thread that links the young man who worked for the Post Office to the stand-out innovator – only Hermann Hauser and Jonathan Milner come close in terms of spotting and nurturing winners – of one of the world’s great innovation hubs?
“I think it is that I’m genuinely excited by new ideas. Innovation really fires me up, then I want to make it work and it doesn’t really matter then what the subject is. The principle of doing something really innovative, that’s the fun bit.”
It’s almost as if he doesn’t just encounter serendipity, he manufactures it.
- Serendipity: It Doesn’t Happen by Accident, priced £17.99, is available on Amazon.
