Editorial: Innovation needs new institutions

Science and technology are moving quickly. The US has more scientists and engineers than ever before, according to the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics. They’re publishing enormous numbers of patents based on their ideas. And yet innovation still isn’t happening fast enough to solve the world’s biggest problems, like climate change, pollution, and disease.

Electric car batteries aren’t yet powerful enough, and dairy-free cheese still tastes like sawdust mixed with pasta water. Runoff from farms using synthetic fertilizers threatens our ecosystems. Companies have spent more than $40 billion trying to develop drugs for Alzheimer’s disease, with little to show for it.

Technology isn’t the only way to address these issues. We need both high-​capacity batteries and more responsive public transportation to reduce emissions in cities. But new technology must still be part of the equation.

During the 20th century, scientists at big, well-funded corporations created the technologies that made the world a better place to live. This system allowed innovations to flow relatively seamlessly from ideation to implementation. But these large-scale corporate research projects have mostly vanished in the 21st century. DuPont dissolved its central research unit ahead of its merger with Dow Chemical. Bell Laboratories, Bell Telephone’s research arm, shrank from thousands of scientists to just a handful over the course of several decades.

Now innovations come from a fragmented system. Governments pick which areas of science to fund, and universities conduct basic research. Start-ups, such as the 10 companies featured in this issue, translate those ideas into a prototype. Then big firms pick up the baton to commercialize the technology. In some cases, ideas move smoothly from one institution to the next. But too often, good ideas fall through the cracks. The fractured model of innovation is especially ill suited for chemicals and materials.

Richard Wang, founder of the next-generation battery start-up Cuberg and the battery industry advisory firm Crevasse Consulting, says the solution is better coordination. He says that government bureaucrats—working far from the tangible problems of industry—sometimes support the wrong areas of basic research and that universities aren’t equipped to prove whether new technologies will work in the real world. That task falls to start-ups backed by venture capitalists.

“They all have their own expertise, but the flow of information between these groups is highly fragmented,” Wang says. “That leads to poor decision-making because nobody truly understands the whole problem.”

If innovation is to outpace climate change, for instance, we need new institutions to glue the fractured pieces of the technology development system back together. Wang imagines an institution where big corporations can share the technological obstacles they face and keep start-ups and researchers focused on the most relevant problems.

Ben Reinhardt is already trying to build such a place. In 2023, he founded Speculative Technologies, a nonprofit seeking to spur technologies that benefit society but aren’t suited for a start-up, university, or other existing institution. He argues that a slew of important technologies don’t fit into these molds, and as a result they don’t move forward.

Reinhardt says the world isn’t going back to a model in which big corporations drive innovation. Speculative Technologies aims to build on the organizational structures that made corporate research organizations like Bell Labs successful, without trying to copy them. The world has changed, Reinhardt says, and we need institutions that are built for our new reality.

Conceiving institutions that bridge the gaps in the 21st century’s fragmented innovation pathway will require the same creativity used to discover new technologies. We’re all starting to feel the effects of climate change. We’re all hurt by disease. We want technologies to solve these problems. But without new institutions, they won’t come fast enough.

This editorial is the result of collective deliberation in C&EN. For this week’s editorial, the lead contributor is Matt Blois.

Views expressed on this page are not necessarily those of ACS.