Innovation is a messy, combinatorial, and non-ergodic process. It thrives on diverse exploration and the collision of weird, idiosyncratic ideas. Yet, our economic and regulatory institutions frequently act to flatten this diversity. These 3 papers explore how monopolies, standard bureaucratic procedures, and rigid regulations actively "prune" the pathways to discovery.

Research Roundup

Compounding Innovation

My new company, Possibility Science, explores the science of innovation: all of the possible futures that might emerge from the dynamic, compounding collisions of ideas. It turns out even “wrong” ideas can have a positive impact by expanding the very idea of what's possible.

A new working paper runs with this idea to describe how regulation “prunes the adjacent possible” [1]. While regulatory analysis usually just tallies up the immediate, visible costs and benefits of a new rule, it misses the losses of the things that were never invented.

They “model regulation as acting on 3 levers:

1. subtraction from the usable stock of building blocks,
2. frictions that lower the share of cross-boundary trials actually attempted, and
3. changes in the success odds of those trials.”

This reveals that even small regulatory exclusions prevent those messy "first steps" that open up entirely new, complementary niches.

What they miss is the complimentary truth that negative externalities can also compound across time and society. Our models at PS include likely outcomes and disruptive long-shots, while also models realistic costs along with possible compounding negative consequences. Everything compounds [2], good or bad.

The net result is a model under realistic tension: regulatory rules have consequences and should be used sparingly to foster the unexpected positive while reducing the unintended negative.

[1] There’s a fair gut check that “adjacent possible” sounds like bullshit consultant talk looking for a book deal, but it does describe something I see in our models at PS.

[2] The forgotten sequel to “Everybody Poops”.

Don’t Make It Weird: Innovation Edition

Men are more likely to be granted patents than women. As with many gender gaps in the economy, the “why” is often underexplored. What if something as seemingly innocent as bureaucratic design could explain (some of) the gap?

A “millions of scientific and technological innovations” reveals that there is no gap for relatively incremental innovations. Only when women attempt to patent highly novel inventions that combine ideas in surprising ways do they face institutional friction.

The authors present evidence that accounts for most of this bias: women's innovations are more likely to be evaluated by women, who in turn have less professional experience needed to evaluate weird ideas that break with the past.

I believe this effect is real and significant. I can also share a hundred other papers showing that this isn’t the only source of bias against female inventors [1].

What it does reveal is how easily a well-intentioned policy—women reviewing women—can actually make a problem worse…and steal from our future supply of transformative new ideas.

[1] So many writers, including the authors of this paper, use phrases like “women examiners are overassigned to women applicants”. This kind of weird, stilted language immediately makes me suspicious. I assume it’s a stylistic response to incels calling women “females”, but “women” is not an adjective, and language used like this just sets off all sorts of warning sirens in my head. Just talk like a normal human being.

Mergers & Acquisitions & Assassinations

Do big companies buy innovative startups to help them grow or to bury them? Try to guess what the new paper “Killer Acquisitions” might reveal…

While the motivations for acquisitions are varied and nuanced, pharmaceutical industry data shows that incumbent firms frequently acquire innovative targets solely to discontinue them. These "killer acquisitions" target startups with competing products, preempting future competition for lucrative markets.

The authors estimate that only “5.3%–7.4% of acquisitions…are killer acquisitions”, but given the highly strategic nature of these acquisitions (and the fact that they “disproportionately occur just below thresholds for antitrust scrutiny”), this phenomenon has a substantial negative effect of innovation in the target domain. [1]

The incentives of individual corporate actors often do not align with the market's need for disruptive, positive-sum innovation.

[1] Imagine if a prominent scientist could buy up a competing line of research or an author could snap up a transformative novel by an up-and-coming author and just bury them. Now that I think about it…

Media Mentions

Last week was another big media week, starting with back-to-back interviews with Marketplace News and Randi Zuckerberg. Both were fun. Both were deep!

We covered a lot of ground—my book, my research, the messy impact on AI on human flourishing. It is rare to jump from one intense, high-level conversation straight into another and have both feel incredibly fun, insightful, and genuinely collaborative.

When the questions are this sharp, the work becomes even more rewarding.

Randi was live; so, go visit her SiriusXM show to learn more. Stay tuned for air dates and links for Marketplace! Thank you to both teams for the brilliant conversations.

I have a new op-ed in the FT this coming week; so, keep an eye open for that.

I also received some lovely feedback from the Library Speakers Consortium and the 2,000+ people who joined my author talk 2 weeks ago. The hosts shared some very flattering praise from the audience, but the best was hearing that someone went straight to a school board meeting afterward to ask harder questions about an AI curriculum contract. That's the whole point: thinking carefully about how this technology meets real human lives. Grateful to all libraries for hosting free conversations like this.

And more interviews in "Thought control: Who is teaching whom in the age of AI?".

SciFi, Fantasy, & Me

I’m still looking for some science fiction and fantasy worth recommending. So, I’ll share my reading and watching list:

1. Children of Strife, Children of Time: Book #4 by Adrian Tchaikovsky (I’m starting with a definite win!)
2. Platform Decay by Martha Wells (More murderbot—how can this go wrong.)
3. The Subtle Art of Folding Space by John Chu (I’ve seen mixed reviews, but I want something different.)
4. Widow’s Bay on Apple TV (It’s all downloaded for my Europe trip this week. Finger’s crossed)
5. Infinite Archive by Mur Lafferty (It’s been an imperfect but fun series of scifi sleuthery.)
6. The Malevolent Eight by Sebastien de Castell (We’ll see.)
7. Band on the Run (in addition to this, I have a few bits of literary fiction and deep-dive nonfiction)
8. Dragon Day by Bob Proehl (Seems like this novella is a dragon version of World War Z)
9. Red Rising by Pierce Brown (I’ve read this before and enjoyed it but like Blindsight, I never quite understood why it appears on so many “Best” lists. Time for a reread)

Stage & Screen

• June 11, Luxembourg: How Europe (and even some of it smallest states) compete and grow in a trade environment dominated by zero-sum leaders
• June 18, Stockholm: The Smartest Thing on the Planet: Hybrid Intelligence
• June 22-30, Online: Six separate talks for Pride, because "The Tax On Being Different" can't be wished away. It's wonderful that so many companies are choosing celebration over fear.
• July 7, MIT: I'm giving the keynote for the MIT App Inventor Global Education Summit taking place this year at MIT CSAIL.
• July 8, NYC: It a book talk for Robot-Proof at the Harvard Club...how swanky!
• Maybe July 24...Maybe San Diego: Maybe....
• September 15, SF: Innovation Day with INSEAD!
• September 16, DC: AI and education–beyond dreams and dread.
• September 19, Phoenix: I'm giving the keynote for the Association of Science & Technology Centers annual conference.
• September 21, Stanford: We're still working on the details, but hopefully I'll be talking about my research on machine learning and neurodiversity for Stanford's Neurodiversity Project.
• September 24, NYC: Culture Shifting Deal Making Summit
• September 29, Cincinnati: AI...in space!
• September 30, Irvine: Hybrid Intelligence for innovation!
• October 6, SF: UCSD Alumni Association
• October 6, SF: Giving a talk at the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation
• October 21-23, Warsaw: So much good stuff is in the works for my first visit to Poland (and maybe time in Germany as well!)
• October, Toronto: The Future of Work...in the Future
• November 19, NYC: Secrets in the dark!

Vivienne L'Ecuyer Ming