Designing Innovation Organisations

Every morning or so, I carve out half an hour to catch up on what the progress community have been writing about. Progress is ultimately such an expansive topic that you can be reading about Deep Tech one moment and housing policy the next. There is always something else to be discovered.

Lately, I’ve been reading up a lot on metascience – how we organise scientific research and science itself.

It’s a curious premise. I think it’s a straightforward assumption that we all want more science to be happening. But what does that actually mean? Science is at once a process and a kind of colossal decentralised organisation we can umbrella-term the “scientific community“. You need researchers, labs, funding, infrastructure ( physical and digital), convening hubs, just sheer time, and much, much more to produce what one would call science.

The scientific method is itself a product of many iterations. You could variously place its “invention“ at Francis Bacon, Ibn al-Haytham, or even way down to Aristotle. Time and time and again, science has been re-organised to improve its own effectiveness.

Now, I am not the most qualified person to have this conversation, though I will leave you with two of my favorite books from my shelves — Science: A Four Thousand Year History by Patricia Fara, and Pathfinders by Jim al-Khalili. Great reads on the subject, each.

To return to the point, I find this whole discussion rather fascinating. And it makes one wonder – are we having a related conversation about meta-innovation? Should we be?

Talk about “accelerating innovation“ is common enough. Governments think of job creation, tax revenues and technology windfalls. Founders see it as a path to asymmetric upside, strike out on their own and solve a meaningful problem. Corporate R&D labs poor billions of dollars into more and more sophisticated technologies, increased efficiency, product development and so on. Researchers spend years and decades pushing a field forward to unlock entire technological verticals or imagine new ways of doing things.

In short, innovation is a rather broad church, and means a dozen different things.

I’ve written about what I think the components of innovation are in other journals:

> Referenced: Notes on a Holistic Model of Progress | 001

We can all agree more innovation being produced is generally a good thing.

How do we approach expanding it?

Wild West No More

I remember somewhat vaguely what I was taught about entrepreneurship in my high school days.

80% of it was focused entirely on the mechanics: here is how you start your own business, grow the company, hire, etc. The remaining 20% was closer to the Social Network story of startups — a group of mavericks coming together to build some crazy idea and miraculously scaling it into an entire company.

So much has changed since then.

The Startup Path has become something known, understood, and — if not truly taught — then something preached, espoused and advocated in various ways. The corporate route vs strike out on your own conversation is up there with the common topics mulled over by soon-to-be graduates, and the latter is increasingly the common answer.

How did that evolution happen?

That is, of course, specific to the region in question. I’m speaking here from a UK / European context; the story is quite different in other corners of the world.

A major part of it comes down to social media and the internet. In short, visibility. Not only can you find hundreds of stories about all kinds of companies being founded, but they have by now been dissected down to atomics. MVPs? 1000 guides. Revenue? Here is a hundred interviews. Build a product? Here’s no-code and prototyping tools. Problem selection? Here’s what is being built.

Alongside that, the same flywheel that shapes the growth of startup ecosystems built the global one.

Several tech startups hit it big. Others start looking in the direction. Gradually, a wave of communities emerge to connect those aspiring entrepreneurs with more established ones. Structured programs pop up to develop talent, help founders learn the ropes and access capital.

National innovation programs begin supporting venture creation directly.

The exact inflection point is hard to pinpoint, but I would place it at some 15-20 years back.

To create something innovative is, fundamentally, to brave the unknown, to create something that has not existed before — because you believe it should. Something of that nature will never be codified, and never should be, lest it ossify completely and defeat the whole purpose of the enterprise.

And yet I think it’s fair to say that for our proverbial aspiring entrepreneur, these days there is a clear path and support structure. You know the path exists, you know the milestones and the examples of the different ways it could be done. There are all sorts of structural support systems, from hubs to accelerators, that specifically exist to help you along the journey.

Startups are now a system. A system of mavericks, and yet a system nevertheless.

Now, what I described above is rather neat and clean. And, sure, theoretically anyone, anywhere in the world can become a founder, or just build something. The path is there.

Why, then, are we having this conversation?

I think there are two sides to the coin:

1. Ecosystem density is a force multiplier. I know from experience. The sheer density of communities like London give you instant access to hundreds of top events, immediate proximity to other talent, ways to build experience and work on other projects, tap into scale capital, and more. It raises your upside, raises the bar, speed things up. Ecosystems are also jagged. There are relatively few mega-hubs in the world that have practically everything, maybe a dozen at best. Innovation hubs with a specific lean, though, can have incredible output — like Oxbridge for biotech, ETH / Zurich for research & engineering, and so on.
2. I’ve thus far used innovation & startups interchangeably, but that’s not really right. VC-backed startups are just one method of scaling a solution. We need other things, too — research collectives and product studios, non-profits and communities, and so on. And this, I think, is especially true in our emerging AI era. Because with the idea-to-company flow effectively collapsing, the apps and the SaaS startups will be built out pretty fast. There is only so many such companies humanity needs. Which means the focus will shift elsewhere; problem discovery and imagination will rise in importance.

And so, this is where we are at.

The largest of ecosystems today have everything you could think of to support venture creation, but not everyone lives in one of those or can relocate there. Nor, I think, should they be obligated to. There is a lot of upside in supporting the growth of other innovation hubs across the planet. Lighting a million additional lightbulbs pays dividends.

Likewise, as the arms race among newly minted vibe-founded companies heats up, I believe the frontier will begin shifting firmly towards Deep Technology. More complex, more impactful problems.

Ones that will demand new forms of organisation to solve, demand new inputs and skills. We’ll likely start seeing completely new forms of innovation, too, or rather forms of organisation, from collectives to artisanal labs.

And no, I don’t quite believe that everyone will just start vibecoding their own apps. But I do think the efficiency of output will go straight through the stratosphere. A single well-structured product shop and its agent swarm can output state-of-the-art marketing products for all of shipping, or agriculture. Iteration rates will 100x. It won’t be immediate, but give it about 5-15 years, accounting for adoption speeds worldwide and propagation rates, and we will start seeing the shift. Entire classes of startups might get cleaved off, because what they are doing can now be overseen by a team 10% the size.

Simply put, the frontier of humanity’s innovation is shifting. As I see it, there are two primary focal points: 1) Expanding and connecting together newer, emerging ecosystems, and 2) Shifting focus on what kinds of problems are being solved, which comes hand in hand with facilitating problem discovery.

What, then, is the next wave?

Orchestrating Chaos

Innovation is an emergent thing. Millions of people working on thousands of problems from hundreds of different angles. Millions of potential ‘solutions‘ are generated — products, tools, technologies, spaces, all kinds of widgets. Some will hit the mark, some will even scale. Others won’t work, but teach their initiators something.

Rinse, repeat.

Precisely what gets built cannot be predetermined. And so there are two paths:

1. Raise capacity (Skill development through fellowships, capital access, convening events and venues). In effect, raise the iteration rate and scale of an ecosystem or sub-ecosystem (University, city, country, sector).
2. Create directional paths — structured, supported pathways along specific verticals like biotech, energy, etc. The principle is identifying a problem space without controlling for the solutions, and therefore enabling structured but open exploration along a trajectory.

We’ve seen an explosion of both over the past several years. I have personally been in the founding cohorts of several experimental fellowships, bootcamps, summits and who knows what else

On the first angle, nearly every city now has startup hubs, event platforms, founder nights, hackathons, and so on. Increasingly, specific areas are also being improved on — talent hire platforms like FiveDegrees, massive capital marketplaces like DeepTechMomentum linking founders with funders, and more. On top of that, there are the traditional accelerators & incubators to provide a full structured pathway to speed up your journey.

The organisation of innovation itself is improving. The elements are known; now people are solving for connecting them.

The second angle is even more curious. There you have programs like FR8 or Australia’s Arrayah, which — in my eyes — are essentially exploration labs. They’re spaces designed for mavericks, builders and dreamers, built on the principle of “We will give you the space and the dynamism, along with whatever resources and tools you need, to figure out a meaningful problem to solve — and work on it“.

The two layers, of course, act in sync. And I think that is precisely what we need to build on.

Open exploration, enabling high-agency people to take time searching for something meaningful, to experiment and tinker — linked with acceleration, supercharging their resulting ideas with every necessary resource.

Blueprints

There are dozens of models being tried right now.

To list just a few:

- Fellowships

- Hacker Houses

- Bridges to powerful ecosystems (I.e. EF’s Bridge)

- Deep Tech-specific incubators

- ARPA-style programs for high-upside research

- Connectors platforms for talent or capital

- University venture labs

- Venture Studios

- So on

Some of these are still quite novel and limited in capacity. The fellowships I were in were great structured skill accelerators, but I was also in the 5% or so selected in most cases. Hacker Houses and various builder hubs are a similar story. The selectivity is intentional and effective; still, there is merit in scaling these up across geographies and letting more people tap into these formats.

Then there is discoverability.

Were I to go through university doing nothing but my degree, I would have missed out on a good 70% of the experiences I had built. How did I do that? By keeping an entire opportunity tracker and hunting down programs I could join, from summits to programs to volunteer roles.

On one hand, that’s the cost of participation — taking the step to look.

On another, what if we vastly improved how, say, a university venture lab model works? Fused a fellowship, an exploration program and an accelerator in one? Build the skills, spend time scanning the problem space alongside other driven people, and get a launchpad to strike out on your own.

The best universities already run such programs, and so do some outliers. But there is a lot of room to expand. Imagine what 2-3 success stories like this could do for an ecosystem.

Then there is the exploration part.

This is just a gut feeling, but I think the way we’re often taught to approach finding problems is suboptimal. “Find a need, find a problem, build something“. Maybe this is just me, but there are thousands of needs and problems. And the thing is, this logic incentivises a kind of first-fit mentality of building a startup. You’re not really looking for something transformative, you’re looking for the first thing that fits a mesh of criteria like scalability, market size and so on.

What if you flipped it on its head? Something like a dedicated EdTech exploration lab, for example, where 15 people work on EdTech products, widgets and other things for a year. You work on different pieces of a vertical, understand it deeply, go through the process of solving smaller problems first. Then build something, but do so on the basis of a deep understanding of the space.

Such labs could be set up for anything from logistics to biotech. And, again, this exists. There are structured accelerators and programs. But they’re usually predicated on you already building something. What if you flip the script and create a space for people to explicitly work on problem space discovery first?

That is what I mean by designing innovation organisations.

The world is changing. At least among a certain slice of the startup community, and many who are thinking to start up, there is a desire to shift towards more meaningful, more interesting problems. “Careers“ in the normal sense, where you simply go and work on something without thinking overly much about what your work is achieving, may not really be around in a decade or two. I suspect the playing field is shifting towards a lot more emphasis on agency, on doing something with specific intent and goals in mind.

What could we collectively accomplish if we create the space for even 1% of of people in every major hub to take that intentional path? If we create structures that support them to focus on finding something meaningful to build an organisation around, equip them with the skills and the resources to do so? What if that number is more like 3%? 10%?

I do wonder, what if.

This journal took a lot more time to write then I expected. I just kept coming up with more thoughts and ideas. A common problem of mine. Blueprints will likely be a recurrent series. There is so much being tried that I want to write about. New types of talent accelerators, exploration spaces, minus one to zero programs. I have an idea or two of my own, after taking a couple shots at building similar programs across Edinburgh and London.

Much to write about.