Lattice 001: Engines of Innovation

This is Issue One of a series covering how the world’s innovation ecosystem works, as well as the most impactful innovation programs & success stories — from DARPA to YC to UNIDO to Bell Labs.

This is also the public journal for the work on the Lattice Program — a project with the goal of developing a world-scale innovation accelerator network. Built atop the best approaches and models for innovation creation from the past 50 years.

Happy reading.

Innovation is an interesting beast.

When a new announcement rolls out, it’s tempting to think of it as a flash of genius. A sudden, brilliant idea.

Anyone who has ever tried solving a hard problems or create something new knows that it is in fact years of iteration, hard work and relentless persistence. You will fail, and you will learn, and you will fail again. Over and over. Such is the game.

On a global level, the picture gets even more interesting.

Modern innovation is a mesh. Every breakthrough serves as a jumping-off point for another. A successful fintech in London might spawn a local version in Singapore that builds on its growth strategy. Photovoltaics research coming out of MIT might fuel a solar boom in China. Round and round the spiral goes.

The current AI hype cycle for one is in no small part a product of these feedback loops.

The Industrial Revolution took something in the range of 70 years to achieve critical mass. It took around 100 years for electricity to be adopted by over 100M people. ChatGPT crossed the same milestone within 2 months.

Welcome to the wonders of planetary-scale innovation.

It wasn’t always like this. For the curious reader, I strongly recommend Pathfinders by Jim Al-Khalili. It’s on the golden age of Arabic Science (His terminology). The point I want to highlight is that it took in essence centuries of information drift and two translation movements (Greek + Persian + Hindi > Arabic, Arabic > Latin, to oversimplify) to arrive at the Renaissance level of scientific progress¹. That is some millennia+ of inquiry and scholarship undertaken by empires and nations from completely different ages of history.

These days? A startup might easily use EU-developed tech, have Korean and Brazilian co-founders, distribution strategy from some hyper-scaler in Silicon Valley and be headquartered in Dubai.

Projects like UNDP Accelerator Labs go even further, covering 115+ countries. And that’s just one program.

This kind of interconnection is relatively new. It’s largely a product of multiple globalisation waves, from air travel to the Internet and global trade.

The modern innovation landscape is a colossal network larger than anything in history — and that opens opportunities unthinkable even 100 years back.

As with any landscape, though, you would quickly spot major trade hubs and towns. So it goes with innovation. These focal points concentrate, accelerate and distribute everything from talent to R&D, supercharging the entire network.

We have the obvious contenders: San Francisco, Shenzhen Bay Area, institutions like MIT and Stanford, entire countries like Singapore that act as a business hub for a whole region. The largest VCs scoop up deal flow from across the entire globe along specific verticals or company types.

All of them, in conjunction, enable humanity to solve the hardest problems at scale, drawing on the resources of the entire globe.

So then, the trillion dollar question.

Where do you look if you want to accelerate the global rate of innovation?

Blue and Green

Did you know that if you zoom out to the maximum on Google Maps, it will surface planet maps, and even the ISS? I found the feature on accident some time ago. Check the ISS cupola view — it is a sight to behold.

Our most fundamental problems affect the entire world.

Climate change. Cancer. Food and water access. These are global problems with localised expressions.

If you want to solve something as major as climate change, you have to operate at all levels. From global cooperation to local action. Global moves which don’t translate to action are largely empty rhetoric; local action without global effort are a rather valiant attempt to attack the ocean with spears. You need both.

All of the above are different classes of problems. Starvation for one is frankly completely technologically solved. We have every conceivable form of hydroponics, automated agriculture and so on. The fact that hunger persists at all is purely a consequence of how we’ve built our social systems, global inequality and often man-made disasters like regional wars. As well as simple economics. Though even here, there are local innovations — cost-effective agriculture, private-public partnerships, programs training the local community — which help mitigate the problem.

Cancer is another beast entirely. Here we have a wall modern science is yet to climb. The world’s best researchers are chipping away at it decade by decade. How to speed up the process? Research grants, open innovation, novel drug discovery technologies and so on. A combination of meta-innovation (Accelerating the rate) and unlocking new tools for the job.

Both of these problems & their systemic solutions could take up a book, so forgive me the brief treatment.

The bottom line is that innovation is a little like keys & locks — except half the time your neighbour’s key suddenly opens your pantry while the lock on your house mutates over your 2 week vacation to require a new key.

The way forward? Many, many, many keys, and even more trained locksmiths.

Ecosystem Topography

So you want a global ecosystem of innovation.

As we’ve established, there are many types of problems. It will come as no surprise that there are also completely different organisations and approaches to solving each.

The innovation potion recipe is something like the following:

1. Talent Hubs — universities, research parks, popular founder hubs. Places that both produce and concentrate top talent. Founders, researchers, engineers, N1 employees.
2. Innovation Culture — risk-tolerant, forward-thinking, open to new solutions to old problems. Hardly a science but you know it when you see it.
3. Capital — research grants, VC money for ventures swinging big, fellowships, seed funding, the lot.
4. Infrastructure — overlaps with others. Co-working spaces, R&D labs, etc. Physical spaces that enable innovation & collaboration.
5. Market — and the % of early adopters it has. Not all countries can support all kinds of innovation just by virtue of scale or purchasing power.²
6. Setup Structure — regulation of all flavours. Quick incorporation, efficient taxes, R&D credits, talent visas. Startup-suitable structure.
7. Scaffolding — the ladder. Think mentorship, events, firesides. Ways for new innovators to break in and for experienced ones to give back. (Shoutout to Startup Community Way³ — they have a more detailed breakdown and it’s by far the most in-detail dive into what makes startup ecosystem tick.)

That’s your ecosystem recipe.

Mixing and matching different components can give rise to different types of innovation. Silicon Valley’s success was built on a synergy trifecta of research, talent and capital. Regulation helped. Over time, the rest of the ecosystem grew around that original core, and now there are YC startup founders in every coffee shop on Mission.

You don’t need everything for success. At the level of individual institutions, specialisation & comparative advantage work. The Cambridge Cluster is world-class in biotech, while VC-backed tech companies usually drift to SF. Same goes for cities, cue London’s fintech scene. Hell, occasional mavericks can whip up a unicorn with none of the above.

At the level of entire countries and regions, though, constraints become an issue. While it’s true that in principle every innovation can disperse to every corner of the globe, that’s just not how things work. We’ve seen a big resurgence in protectionism, especially with US tariffs and China creating a kind of semi-permeable market with its own national champions.

The most effective option, at world level, is to have some sort of dual system. Centralised clusters to chip away at the hardest of problems; decentralised networks of smaller innovation hubs to support local talent and localised solutions.

If we want to speed up at the rate at which 1) major problems get solved, and 2) human prosperity continues to increase, we need to boost both – and then some.

The Lattice Program

The next issue will cover the massive array of programs which do exactly that. And there really are hundreds across all levels. From accelerators to research hubs, from national policy to global social impact challenges. There truly are innumerable ways of speeding up various types of innovation, some more effective than others.

You may by this point be wondering why this series is taking such a large scope.

As it happens, my interest has always been system-level problems and stuff like macro-innovation rates. I want to move forward the entire world, if I can help it. Even by 1%. That’s my life’s work, in a sense — boost the global rate of (socially beneficial) innovation by 2-5%.

So I asked myself a deceivingly simple question:

How can we get to a future of prosperity faster?

Note that I say a future. It’s not up to me or anyone else to dictate what that vision looks like. I don’t really follow any major school of thought on the issue, though I my logic and approach have much in common with techno-humanism, as it’s called in some corners of Substack.

I do want to explore what continued technological development and systemic change can enable, though. And to speed up the process, myself & associates are developing the white paper for the largest scale accelerator mesh ever built.

We call it the Lattice Program. Hence the title.

It’s a longshot. I intend to dedicate a solid 10 years of my future and career at acquiring the necessary knowledge and resources to build something of this magnitude. Nor am I going directly after it, of course. As the following issues explore innovation models, so will we develop smaller-scale, city or regional versions of Lattice to test out and improve the concepts.

Next, will dive deep into the topography of modern innovation accelerators, from YC to UNIDO.

See you in Issue Two.

Footnotes

1. The history of the Translation Movement is actually a fascinating study of how science is fundamentally a process of co-creation. Something done over decades and centuries, across languages and cultures.
2. This isn’t strictly true since you can be based in Dubai while catering to the Chinese market or sell to Malaysia out of Singapore, etc. So this really depends. The point is that, from the perspective of ecosystem creation and growth, the availability of a local launchpad and market for your innovation cluster can be a big factor.
3. You can order it from almost anywhere on here: https://startupcommunityway.com/. Some of the best frameworks on ecosystem success out there.