Thread by @JMateosGarcia

Fantastic keynote about policies to generate radical innovation to kick off #IGL2019. How do you design institutions to be able to do this? Some notes:
1. Control your failure (error) rate *upwards*. A perfectly successful portfolio isn’t supporting radical innovation.

2. Orchestrate technological ecosystems with deliberation. This is what DARPA project managers do, arranging technologies like chess pieces (see Erica Fuchs’ slide)

3. Accept that today’s assessments of research excellence might not be relevant for tomorrow’s ideas. Look all those (purple) ideas that DARPA reviewers score below the average...yet get funded

4. Accept there isn’t a single model to support radical innovation. Different institutional designs are suitable for different purposes (some examples from Erica Fuchs’ talk)

5. There is no stationary state in supporting radical innovation, as the changes in the history of DARPA shows. There are no silver bullets here, and even if there were, they wouldn’t work for long.

6. How do you maintain accountability with high tolerance for failure & low bureaucracy? By recruiting mission oriented people.

7. And how do you evaluate Asimovian organisations designed to transform the technological basis of our society? What is your counterfactual? One to mull over for the rest of this inspiring conference.