How We Organise Innovation

A few days ago I came across the Dutch government's move to establish a new organisation for disruptive innovation. NADI, the Nationaal Agentschap voor Disruptieve Innovatie, is explicitly inspired by the ARPA model, with DARPA its original and best-known example.

I did what I tend to do when I encounter a new institution: I tried to work out where it fits.

That sounds straightforward. It wasn't.

Over the past months I have spent quite a bit of time trying to understand the landscape around research, knowledge and innovation. In the Netherlands alone that quickly produces an impressive collection of organisations and acronyms: research funders, universities, knowledge institutes, ministries, advisory bodies, programmes for applied research and public-private partnerships.

Look beyond the Netherlands and the landscape widens further. Germany has institutions such as Fraunhofer and Max Planck. France has CNRS and its own distinctive institutional traditions. At European level, Horizon Europe spans instruments and organisations ranging from the ERC to the EIC and EIT. In the United States there are the NSF, NIH, national laboratories and the ARPA agencies.

Another organisation inspired by the ARPA model therefore seemed like another piece to add.

And that was where I got stuck.

The Lego view

My instinct when confronted with a landscape like this is analytical. First identify the pieces. Establish what each does. Find the categories. Understand the differences. Draw the connections. Eventually, if you have done your homework properly, everything should fit.

I have come to think of this as my Lego view of the world.

There is nothing particularly wrong with it. Before you can understand a system, it helps to know what is actually in it. A research funder is not a university. An advisory council is not a research institute. Two organisations that appear similar from a distance may have quite different purposes, powers and histories.

The inventory gives you grip.

But something strange happened as my inventory improved.

I knew more, yet the whole did not become correspondingly clearer.

The organisations were sitting increasingly neatly in their boxes while the thing I actually wanted to understand seemed to be happening somewhere between them.

So I changed the question.

Instead of asking:

What are all these organisations?

I started asking:

What are people trying to make happen here?

Put the people back in

Once I did that, the landscape began to move.

Someone wants to understand why something happens.

Someone has an idea for a technology that does not yet exist.

A teacher wonders whether children could learn something differently. A physician encounters a problem in clinical practice. A small company discovers that a process could be dramatically improved. A researcher sees a possibility nobody has tested. A government concludes that dependence on a particular technology has become a strategic problem.

Different situations, but they generate remarkably similar needs.

People need knowledge. Sometimes knowledge that already exists; sometimes knowledge that still has to be created.

They need other people who know things they do not.

They need expertise. Time. Money. Equipment. Data. Legitimacy. Places to experiment. Sometimes customers. Sometimes public institutions willing to participate, regulate or buy.

And they need connections.

The person who understands a problem is rarely also the person who possesses all the knowledge, capital, authority and practical capability required to address it. Researchers find practitioners. Companies find universities. Governments convene consortia. Students become researchers and researchers move into companies. Specialists from different disciplines discover that they have been working on different parts of the same problem.

Not everything needs to become a product or an application. Sometimes the result is simply a better understanding of the world.

But when knowledge does travel towards use, it may become a treatment, a teaching method, a standard, a machine, a policy, a company, a piece of software or simply a better way of doing something.

Then people use it.

And what happens in use produces new questions.

Seen this way, the institutions do not disappear. They become more intelligible.

Many of them can be understood as answers to recurring needs in these movements. Some educate people. Some investigate. Some provide money. Some connect. Some translate knowledge into practice. Some advise governments. And some are deliberately designed for questions where several uncertain approaches need to be tried and actively steered.

ARPA-like organisations are one example of that last category. They are not the model for organising innovation. They are a particular institutional answer to a narrower question: what do you build when a problem is important, the route is uncertain, several approaches may need to be tested in parallel, and the work requires unusually active programme management and a path towards use?

Other societies and sectors have produced different answers.

Once I started looking this way, the institutional landscape stopped resembling an organisational chart.

It became a landscape of movement: questions, people, knowledge, money, authority, technology and experience travelling between different places.

A lens in France

Last year I encountered an enormous Fresnel lens in a French museum.

It had once been used for a lighthouse and stood roughly two metres high. Its concentric sections reproduce much of the focusing effect of a far thicker lens while using much less glass.

I took several photographs of it. Move around such a lens and what you see through it changes. Parts of the world behind it enlarge, shift or distort. The object remains where it is; your view through it does not.

There is a limit to every metaphor, and I don't want to make the Fresnel lens do more work than it should. But I realised later why the object had stayed with me.

Models compress reality.

They have to leave things out. The important question is what survives the compression.

My Lego model preserved entities particularly well. It showed boundaries, categories and responsibilities.

It did not preserve movement particularly well.

And it obscured something else.

Where you stand matters.

The same landscape, different routes

Imagine somebody starting a company alone with an unusual idea.

The knowledge and innovation landscape may appear primarily as a problem of access. Who knows something about this? Where could I test it? Is there funding? Am I eligible? Who can introduce me to somebody who understands what I am trying to do?

Now put yourself in a company with seven employees.

You may have customers, technical expertise and a genuinely promising idea. But taking two people out of the business for months to assemble a consortium, understand a programme and write applications may simply not be practical.

The institutions have not changed.

Your route through them has.

Inside the R&D department of a multinational, the same landscape looks different again. Universities, laboratories, intellectual-property specialists, European programmes, standards bodies and international partners may all be accessible parts of it. The organisation may employ people whose job is to establish precisely these connections.

Routes that are expensive and difficult for a seven-person company to use may be ordinary roads here.

For a researcher, a university or a hospital, the landmarks shift again. The formal landscape is recognisable, but its entrances, incentives and useful connections are different.

Then take perhaps the strangest position of all: government.

Government is itself travelling through this landscape while simultaneously trying to alter it. It funds research and education, sets rules, creates incentives, buys things, convenes people and occasionally establishes an entirely new institution because an important route appears to be missing.

That suggests another way of looking at innovation policy.

Alongside asking how much money government spends or which organisations it creates, we can ask what it is doing to the possible routes through the landscape.

The landscape may be shared. The routes through it are not.

A few landmarks

None of this makes the institutions unimportant. Landscapes need landmarks.

The table below is deliberately small. It mixes funders, research organisations, programmes and networks because those are some of the forms this landscape takes. The entries are not counterparts. They are examples of different institutional answers to recurring needs.

Another observer could take exactly the same landscape and produce a different table.

Follow money and one map appears. Follow knowledge and another. Follow people and education and it changes again.

Start with a small company rather than a ministry and some enormous institutions almost disappear while previously minor connections become decisive.

A useful model does not eliminate these perspectives.

It helps us move between them.

Looking again

This leaves me in a rather different place from where I started.

A news item about a new Dutch innovation agency prompted a familiar question: where does this organisation fit?

I can answer that question better now. But I am less interested in it.

I want to know what happens to the landscape when an institution like this is introduced.

Which routes does it create or shorten?

Who can reach whom more easily?

Which ideas can travel further, and which risks become possible to take?

If something succeeds, where can it travel next?

Those questions apply well beyond one new Dutch agency. We can ask them about a research funder, a university, a European programme, an applied research institute, a corporate R&D department or an entire innovation policy.

I have not discarded the Lego view.

I still want to know what the pieces are. Without that groundwork, talk about relationships and networks quickly becomes vague.

The inventory matters. It is simply no longer where I want to stop.

I started by trying to find the right place for each institution in a model.

Somewhere along the way, I became more interested in the spaces between them.

First learn the landmarks.

Then look beyond them.

And ask:

What is trying to happen here?

What has to move, and between whom?

And from where I stand, which routes are actually open?