Out of Whack!
Innovating Innovation
Innovation, the pursuit of new ideas, products, and methods, has led to a culture of a constant need for more. Leaders across the spectrum — public and private sector organizations, politicians, financiers, journalists, and influencers — are overly influenced by a worldview that values maximizing growth above all. As someone who has participated in cycles of technology, research, innovation, and business for decades, I am concerned that the effectiveness of our leadership has been reduced by a maximalist approach, amplified by the field of digital technology, spreading throughout our society. Chasing scale at speed is making us fragile at a time when we need resilience and sustainability. Innovation is, in many cases, exacerbating rather than mitigating negative impacts, as the societal climate and the climate of our planet have reached dangerous levels of uncertainty. At risk are values that most claim to strive for: democracy, freedom, human rights, and equity. Critical long-term innovation is also in jeopardy.
Technology, innovation, economics, progress, prosperity, humanity, and society are all inextricably linked. The health of our society depends on our ability to manage the tensions between these elements with shifts in technology, culture, politics, and policy. We are currently failing. Powers derived from money, position, belief, celebrity, ideas, and influence align and decouple from responsibility. Capitalism today is driving and responding to a vision of a “frictionless” future where a hyper-scaled few absorb all the nutrients and accumulate all the rewards. Dangerous levels of extremism abound, and everything feels out of whack. Maximalist growth has enabled unconstrained digitization of our economy and our lives. Our connectivity is degraded as our communication is reduced to simplistic extremes and debates to be won.
Our current conversations are limiting us in both their form and substance. Power struggles between extremes play out on Twitter and the “airwaves” — corporations vs. government, tech utopia vs. dystopia, individual freedoms vs. interdependence. Claims that “only tech can fix it” are pitted against calls to “put tech in their place.” Crypto/web3 utopians believe their technology will distribute ownership and realign power. Detractors warn that crypto is an agent to undermine governments or a ruse to enable tech founders and VC billionaires to build more power and wealth. In fact, none of these statements are completely right or wrong. Neither technology nor people in the tech industry are uniformly good or bad, but there is plenty of blame and lack of accountability to go around. Debates, predicated on a win/lose model, protect the status quo. Those in power benefit from the destruction and/or obstruction of any systems or norms that might check that power.
Digitized, or 1/0, thinking fails to acknowledge complexity. This kind of oversimplification, where logic takes precedence over all emotions, ignores the spaces in between that make us human. Meanwhile, both-sides-ism and false equivalency deflect from seeing the real dangers. There is often no one center or middle as a meeting place. There is no singular model of how to grow, lead, or live. Business and/or engineering problem solving works best when the definition of the problem can be constrained without dangerous consequences. In our urgency to have solutions, we often ask the wrong questions, do not revisit key assumptions, and too narrowly frame the problem. Technical and/or business model innovation alone can’t save us as we face the consequences of technology, a changing climate, pandemics, and national and geo-political shifts. These are “wicked” social problems.
We need alternative approaches to addressing our complex multi-domain problems. We need innovation around how we think about innovation. A good place to start is understanding the depth and breadth of the influence of digitization and growth maximalism that is obscuring our view of a different way forward. Severing the link between unconstrained innovation and human progress becomes even more urgent when we look ahead at developments in AI, metaverse, crypto, neurotech, autonomous vehicles, drones, biotech, climate tech, and more.
Given the state of the world and planet, our margin of error is smaller and we have less time. If we are willing to face a more nuanced view of our current trajectory, we can both slow the downward spiral and adjust forces of change for the future. In a world where it seems that we go from one crisis to another, understanding the roles of innovation and growth matters because they provide context for the other challenges we face.
The state of our innovation ecosystem is (too) powerful and toxic
In my 2008 book, Closing the Innovation Gap, I describe innovation using the metaphor of a biological ecosystem — a dynamic interaction of three domains of ideas and people, where all interact with the others. The research community quests for knowledge, development brings ideas to market, and application drives activity by bringing science or tech to bear on the needs of individuals and organizations. Just as plants require water and sunlight to grow, sustaining innovation requires the right types of nourishment from leadership, funding, policy, education, and culture. Innovation ecosystems, like living ones, are constantly changing and require dynamic balance to thrive.
The book was intended as a wakeup call. Our leadership, culture, and funding had all shifted to focus on the short term, and we were not investing enough in research to plant the seeds for future innovation. I was, and still am, concerned about the innovation ecosystem withering and dying, which is what usually happens to biological ecosystems that are off balance. But my perspective was too narrow minded — a career spent leading innovation created an intense, at times myopic, focus. In describing the innovation ecosystem, I was limited by looking at innovation and growth as simple metrics of health — ends in themselves. I did not explicitly address the notion that innovation should serve a bigger picture: the ecosystems of humanity (individual and societal) and our environment. Innovation is not just a business process but a way of thinking in response to, and driving, change. I also didn’t think enough about the interaction between the culture of innovation and broader societal behaviors. Values are not just what we say we care about, but what we prioritize and pay attention to.
The innovation ecosystem did not fade or die. With imbalanced priorities, its growth, driven by digital technology, became more and more self-serving and greed driven, proliferating like a metastatic cancer. The interplay of technology and scale accelerated as new advances and industry culture focused on maximizing speed and scale. We see the industry’s values reflected in the extreme words used in the tech industry.
- Success is defined by dominance — achieving ultimate power through creating moats to keep out potential competitors with network effects, marketplaces, flywheels, and rapid scaling that benefit platforms more than consumers. Unicorns and dragons describe the often outrageous (unrealistic) valuations of companies, reflecting perceived momentum of profits and growth. Class A shares limit accountability and keep control in the hands of founders even after companies go public. As fund size becomes a competition, growing AUM (assets under management) levels lead to even more concentration of power.
- The mantra is to move fast and break things towards a goal of frictionless growth. Obstacles are removed through disruption of markets, regulation, institutions, norms, and lives without regard for what may be lost. The goal is to attract and retain users with frictionless experiences using personalization and engagement that demand massive data gathering. Ever more powerful AI turns humans into humanoids and personas for targeted advertisements. Any hesitation is removed through financialization and gamification (and now tokenomics) in all areas of our lives.
- Calls for democratization of content or governance, elimination of all gatekeepers when the platform is the gatekeeper, and trustless systems that rely on trust in the technology/algorithm misdirect us and obfuscate who is benefiting from these systems. Micro-targeted advertising is about revenue growth, not a better user experience.
- Metrics driven management and growth hacking support these values with a fixation on measurable goals. Hard turns in strategy, pivots, are made in reaction to impatient markets or investors.
Where tech goes, we all go. In search of innovation, leaders looked to Silicon Valley as a model, and the values and norms driving SV innovation branched out to other industries, organizations, and countries. Software ate the world and digital technology became the foundation for all aspects of our lives. Domination as a value within the tech industry expanded to an unhealthy relationship with technology (and wealth) that overtook our society (Authoritarian Technology, 2018).
We (individuals, leaders, cultures, and subcultures) don’t just respect and embrace new technologies, we worship innovation in the name of economic growth. We surrender our agency, addicted to greater and faster innovation through seduction and fear. We love the excitement of something new and easily gravitate toward technology that constrains reality and can give us a sense of certainty in this turbulent world. Voices that would call for more balance are silenced for fear of negatively impacting the economy or jobs, even though innovation itself often threatens jobs. Fear of excess government power leads to few constraints on private sector power — we should fear both extremes.
For decades CEOs and economists have played an outsized role in society, not just contributing their crucial expertise, but performing expertise on all issues. Then tech founders and investors who were “changing the world” became the celebrities, heroes, and role models. Cults of personality in the business and entertainment worlds often reinforce each other.
Greed is not new. Neither are management practices that drive efficiency and productivity over human well-being. Concentrated power in the private sector has long aligned with politicians to protect specific religious, economic, or technological ideologies over the common good. But once again, digital technology fuels the flames, reinforcing, amplifying, and magnifying the effects. The fact that this has happened before is not an excuse to avoid mitigating it now. We, including much of the tech industry, bought into the inevitability of a future designed by a small group of (very smart) people, whose incentives may not align with the well-being of society at large. The influence shows up in all sorts of subtle and not so subtle ways.
Growth Maximalism is compromising other key values
Obviously, size and reach matter — it is a question of how. The current way we build, scale, and lead prioritizes early and rapid scaling over the interrelated values of diversity, leadership capacity, trust, resilience, and consideration of others and the future.
Performance metrics are used to drive growth, often at the expense of all types of diversity. Extreme focus and data-driven monocultures can leave out people, organizations, or issues that don’t fit neatly into existing patterns. This over-optimization makes it harder to detect harms early or adapt to shifting priorities and new advances, which often leads to more fragile systems. Through the selection of criteria to scale, values are implicitly encoded in the choice of metrics and decision-making algorithms. Just as it is hard to enumerate rights, it is hard to encode a metric for fairness or goodness in our algorithms. We avert our eyes (and measurement tools) rather than potentially slowing growth or profits by identifying and measuring harms to be eliminated or minimized.
While we claim to be “people first,” our leadership styles are not human centered. Concentrating power is too often accompanied by a flattening of the hierarchy of values, giving fundamental laws, rights, habits, and convenience the same apparent level of entitlement. The other extreme — submitting to the latest polls, the loudest voices, newest technology, or generational norms — is not good leadership either. Fully decentralized leadership can be inefficient and risky when applied at scale. Complete fragmentation of power is susceptible to manipulation that works against democratization. Leadership requires a type of “relationship trust” that goes hand in hand with mistrust by encouraging verification through questioning. This cannot be automated and doesn’t easily scale. Transactional trust can be digitized into smart contracts, but a functional society needs more than contracts and transactions.
Focused on building up their own brands, too many leaders are lashing out instead of modeling collaboration and communication. In this paradigm of shock and awe, we are losing the capacity for deeper, less structured discussions. The right type of conversation is shocking in a good way, leading to uneasiness as a precursor to progress rather than the certainty of a settled answer.
Prioritizing maximal speed removes time and space for consideration of use, misuse, and abuse. Disruption is not bad, per se, if it is applied with consideration of consequences. We can’t know about all the future consequences of a new discovery or technology, but that is no excuse to ignore potential problems. Consideration of others and diverse perspectives takes a little extra time but leads to better outcomes. We are moving so fast in our silos that we forget what connects us, including the practice of empathy, which takes attention. Employees, especially younger ones, are demanding more consideration from management.
Resilience draws on a capacity for consideration. Maintaining balance while navigating increasing uncertainty requires modulation of speed and power. Our decision-making too often tends towards reactionary and reflexive over proactive and responsive. Agility is used to justify fragmentation — a focus on small pieces that are faster to solve. When we don’t take the time to understand the architectural context, we can become brittle. Planning has been devalued, a response to slow bureaucracies that take too long to plan before moving forward. This need not be a binary decision; we can both plan and act to meet the demands of today’s pace of change.
Dominance undermines the foundation of competition and innovation
Collaborative competition is a powerful motivator and inspires new growth, but competition turns toxic if the rules are unclear, unfair, or disregarded; if the goals are unattainable; or if the consequences of loss are dire, such as the demise of a business, political career, or reputation. A winner-take-all culture leads to an environment of scarcity and deep, often unacknowledged feelings of endangerment that can be exploited by those seeking ultimate power.
Companies in dominant positions often point to shifts in power (which large company is dominant at any given point in time) as a sign of healthy competition, but the size and position of any one company is not what is most toxic. A culture of dominance pushes each young startup to grow at all costs in order to attain the next round of funding, typically only 12 to 18 months away. When the largest companies get most of the attention, it is harder for small and medium size businesses to compete for talent and funding. Imagine if, instead of celebrating mythical, solitary creatures, we rewarded entrepreneurs for aspiring to be more like redwood trees or majestic oaks that grow to the sky and share nutrients.
When discussions around industrial issues like Big Tech, Oil, Food, or Pharma focus only on the companies themselves, the power and influence of funding is underestimated. Funding drives the tone and areas of focus, dictating what gets attention and incentivizing good and bad behaviors. Investors have enabled and encouraged the “SV” culture that exists today. The number and size of investment funds, as well as the interaction between private and public markets all play a role in creating an atmosphere that swings between overabundance and scarcity.
Venture funding drives the entrepreneurial stages of the innovation ecosystem, and its foundation is eroded by an extreme focus on transactional returns at the expense of nurturing entrepreneurs and helping to build new companies. Venture capitalists brand themselves on taking risks on contrarian founders and companies, but many are increasingly risk averse and are anything but contrarian as they flock together around investment strategies and deal terms, leading to a less diverse and resilient ecosystem. The whiplash effect in a down market, an abrupt transition to scarcity and layoffs from a “founder friendly” environment chasing hot deals with high valuations, is not good for employees or innovation. Entrepreneurship and investing have become commodified, suggesting that everyone should become an angel or start a company. Only the fastest growing survive; when one startup in a market gets to a certain scale, it is very hard for new competitors to get funded. Given the available capital for the asset class, competition, and quest for management fees, the outsized influence of the strongest investors is getting reinforced with larger and larger funds.
Funding of research and philanthropy has also been impacted by the trends of scale and has further upset a balance of government, corporate, and philanthropic funding sources that help ensure a diverse set of agendas and perspectives. Growth in corporate and philanthropic funding of research is good (with transparency and proper oversight), but these funds are directed through the lens of private sector values and may tilt toward applied research. The giving pledge and movements like effective altruism are driving increased giving from high wealth individuals and their foundations. While we celebrate the resources that are going to important causes, we need to also understand the leveraged consequences of concentration in this sector, when a minority made up of the wealthiest guides our future through their business activities and their giving. Tax deductions are incentives to unleash the power of giving for society, but the power is not always accompanied by a responsibility to truly consider the common good.
Unfortunately, our current competitive climate is also upsetting the balance of key elements in cultures of innovation — questioning, openness, risk, patience, and trust. Questions spur innovation, if they are framed correctly. Questioning is one of the best means of oversight, from journalists who hold truth to power to leaders and individuals who are willing to stand up to “best practices” or “acceptable behaviors” that they know are harmful or just wrong. Knowing that one will be questioned by board members, customers, employees, or investors can change behaviors. We too often use growth as an excuse not to question ourselves and others. Younger people who have grown up online are quicker to question, which is great, but I would caution us all to think more about how we question. Judgmental, unconsidered questions often backfire in producing the effect we desire.
It is harder (and more dangerous) to risk experimentation at scale. Nurturing new seeds in a greenhouse is different than running a factory farm where mistakes can be costly and dangerous. In a start-up company or project — like in a greenhouse — what is a flower, weed, or fruit-bearing plant may not yet be clear. In our scale fast, fail fast environment, potentially good and important ideas are lost because they do not get funded or given a chance to build.
Leadership, policy, and culture are reinforcing the (unhealthy) status quo
This is broader than just a tech problem, but digital technology is a core element, and the innovation ecosystem’s environmental factors are mostly reinforcing the status quo. Reflecting both an interest and expertise gap, legislative attempts have been slow and narrow. Through money and narrative, companies have undue influence on policy, politicians, and public discourse, and current institutions struggle to keep up with the pace of change and complexity. Most regulation is backward looking because problems need to be pervasive and significant enough to get attention. They are then harder to address, especially when solutions involve adding friction to the user experience in cost, inconvenience, or time. We struggle to balance taking action with doing too little, too late in a way that might be harmful.
We minimize harms by not adequately naming them. There is no consistent counternarrative to the promises of tech, and we too often reinforce a narrative by mirroring its language. Under the influence of our relationship with growth maximalism, too many appease those in power or are complicit with silence.
Lies and propaganda are not just “misinformation” or funny memes. Truth does not drown out lies — in fact, lies undermine truth. Terms like “social sharing” or “peer-to-peer trust” hide the fact that trust models have changed. Any expertise is rejected out of hand, as is the need for any type of institution that connects us. “Attention economy” sounds like an opportunity for growth, not an environment that degrades our cognitive capacities. We seem unable to sustain attention as we jump from one trending crisis or fad to another, obsessed and then over it.
“Fact checking” and “content moderation” are only the tip of the iceberg. They do not account for the foundational context layer that influences how that input is interpreted — a person’s worldview, their conscious and unconscious narrative, biases, prior knowledge, and trust model. This is harder to understand, penetrate, or remodel and can’t be done at a homogeneous scale. There is a difference between facts and truth (which includes belief); facts do not have two sides. The harm goes much deeper than “political polarization,” which sounds like something exclusive to DC that we should tolerate. Diverging values and disbelief in the existence of basic facts are cracks in the foundation of our society that can only be painted over or ignored for so long before everything that interconnects us collapses.
In the name of “free speech” we are stifling voices with bullying. The magnitude of content drowns out all but the loudest and most powerfully destructive. Danger builds as algorithmic amplification prioritizes what we are against over what we are for, our identities increasingly defined by the people we are against. Ideology combined with mythology go mainstream. Extremist and fundamentalist views, regardless of ideology, have hijacked the body politic and become the new norm. Flooding an environment with toxic sewage is a great metaphor for the worst of our current information environment. An overload of everyday content and choices can also be damaging, like flooding from tsunamis, storms, and the slow but steady rise in sea level. In the name of “eliminating gatekeepers” and “unlimited content creation,” we hand the curation of our life experiences to AI, our unconscious algorithms, and the threat of a faceless mob. “Free speech” and “free markets” are used to justify a decoupling of power and responsibility, de-prioritizing human rights and dignity.
The impacts are not just minimized but obfuscated when we continue to use words that have been hijacked by extreme ideologies and corporate interests to undermine their meaning and change the conversation — words like “community,” “democratize,” “big lie,” “freedom,” “rights,” or “openness.” The “First Amendment” is used to enable unconstrained user generated content and the “Second Amendment” is used to unleash unlimited firepower. “Transparency” only leads to accountability if we can understand and act on what we see, yet private and public sector success is too often accompanied by impunity rather than accountability.
Resist the pull of inevitability — question maximalism and binary thinking
“The question we face in the digital age is not how to have it all, but how to maintain valuable activity at a societal price on which we can agree. Just as we have made laws about tolerable levels of waste and pollution, we can make rules, establish norms, and set expectations for technology. Perhaps the online world will be less instantaneous, convenient, and entertaining. There could be fewer cheap services. We might begin to add friction to some transactions rather than relentlessly subtracting it. But these constraints would not destroy innovation. They would channel it, driving creativity in more socially desirable directions.” Estrin, Gill
In accepting the worldview of maximizing growth, we are accepting bullying, surveillance, fragmentation, and disintegration of our information ecosystem and the fabric of society. We are compromising democracy and capacities that are critical to our ability to compete and innovate. By not doing the hard work of choosing what to trade off, choices are being made for us. Dominance, by definition, leads to the destruction of human rights and dignity. It all feels overwhelming, but our tasks may become clearer if we are willing to look deeper at the cause of disease.
Changing culture can start with leaders who have the conviction and motivation to pause, break some bad habits, and examine our relationship with technology, growth, and wealth. The first step is to resist the pull of inevitability. Question an extreme binary model (without giving in on bright line values like democracy). Revisit our assumptions around extreme scale at speed. Rejecting maximalism does not have to imply falling behind or standing still. Don’t be afraid of good friction. Look at what incentives we might remove. Offer attractive counternarratives.
We should not underestimate the impact of the stories we tell and the celebrities we follow. Excellence in the currency of soundbites, tldr, and tweets should not be at the expense of nuance in the thinking behind our messaging. Communicating complexity and ambiguity is hard (as evidenced by this piece ), but we need to be careful about relying on fragmented messaging and create narratives that fight fragmentation of society. There are so many types of games — infinite and finite, zero sum and non-zero sum — that can help us move beyond using gamification to feed our reflexive addictions and encourage strategy, collaboration, and understanding of the world around us. Storytelling is an art that, when done well, can play an important role in countering utopian authoritarians of any kind by providing alternative, more balanced views of the future.
While improving our communication, we must figure out how to counteract the damage from conspiracy theories. It is urgent that we look at our information ecosystem in its entirety in addition to the tech at its core. We need to strengthen our cognitive immune systems across our society. We are not developing our critical thinking skills and losing our capacity for deep thought, which makes us all more susceptible to manipulation.
Think out of the box to identify alternative paths forward
Bringing the innovation ecosystem into better balance is not a singular effort. It will take deep repairs and continuous maintenance. The required level of change necessitates revisiting some key implicit and explicit assumptions around our values, our organizational and leadership norms, and how we think about oversight. Here, I will plant a few seeds as we envision an alternative future together.
Values: Some values are more nuanced, with a spectrum of positions to balance, and others have brighter lines. Democracy and human rights are moral imperatives — maximizing growth is not. Sustainable companies need profits, but that is not the same as being rewarded exclusively for maximizing profit and power at the expense of shared prosperity. In making trade-offs, we should keep in mind the interplay between values, contradictions, and dualities instead of focusing on each in a vacuum. If we resist extremism, we can design for speed and consideration, scale and diversity, the leader and the led, questions and growth, trust and mistrust, rights and responsibility, competition and collaboration.
As we map values to action, we should be on alert for patterns of hypocrisy when unconstrained rights in the name of freedom are coupled with restrictions that curtail, or eliminate, freedom. Describing complex systems like democracy or human rights with a simple phrase and assuming that there is a shared understanding can lead to misunderstanding how people and leaders will govern, invest, consume, and behave at the ballot box. Our now fragile systems of economic globalization are built on common values of profit and growth. How can we connect around the values necessary to protect diverse populations from climate change, health risks, and disruptive technologies?
Alternative growth models: We should expand beyond one model for growth that is based on homogeneous scaling and reduces humans to collections of data points. An alternative to consider is “interconnecting diversity,” a more distributed approach to growth and reach. The original internet infrastructure was a distributed architecture designed for resilience. A diverse set of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) each strived to meet the needs of their customers. Connections between computers anywhere on the internet was assured regardless of ISP through a variety of protocols including TCP. Diverse organizations or communities — each with their own different rules for how they are operated and governed, who they serve, and how they are led — can drive collective action when interconnected at a foundational level with shared information flow, mission, and values. The term gatekeeper has a bad name, but in this context, we could think of a more friendly, equitable set of floodgates or valves that interconnect, curate, open, and guard in various ways. In a more distributed environment, we can more safely experiment with different types of distributed scaling, from blockchain based DAOs to what might be the structural equivalent to agriculture experimenting with vertical hydroponic farming.
Much of the discussion around Musk buying Twitter revolves around what to do about “the town square.” Who controls the company matters, but the heart of the problem is that Twitter has too much influence to begin with (which makes its leadership matter even more). Maybe humanity is not served by one enormous all-powerful town square. Lots of smaller town squares don’t have to reinforce filter bubbles and fragmentation if they are designed with the right type of connectivity between them.
Leader and led: Our leadership best practices should evolve to be more fluid, adaptive, and resilient. Decoupling leadership and absolute power would encourage more dynamic roles for both leaders and the led, sharing power through values, ideas, perspectives, and positions. GenZ embodies fluidity in so many areas; let’s apply their openness to leadership and hierarchies of power. The opposite may happen when organizational structures and rules are designed so that they can be easily coded into algorithms, losing flexibility and humanity. Leadership, as with parenting, should account for the capacities and development stages of organizations or communities.
New approaches to balancing the innovation ecosystem: To ensure dynamic equilibrium, given the pace of change, we need to expand our view of what governance means to a more elastic and collaborative set of systems including market incentives, regulation and standards, shifting best practices and norms, language, and training. We can experiment early in more controlled environments, scale in the right way and time, and continuously adapt. Incremental steps should be evaluated in the context of looking down the road to make sure they are directionally correct and do not distract from the profound structural change needed.
We each have a role in questioning assumptions, having hard discussions, and learning from, mentoring, advising, and investing in a new generation of leaders (and those they lead). A broader range of private sector funding behaviors, trading off risk, return, and timeframes, would encourage diversity in types of organizations, companies, and founders. This needs to be balanced with public sector influence so that we encourage innovation that is not as profitable including basic science, development of orphan drugs, or equitable application to diverse communities.
The types of people, motivations, risks, and results vary between the research, development, and application communities. As we look at specific ideas for how and by whom more balance is put in place, we should evaluate different approaches based on ecosystem community, size, and industry. We should be extra careful with oversight and funding of research so exploration is not limited to areas or applications that are most urgent or popular at the moment. In the development community we need to balance experimentation and protection against harms at scale. To protect consumers, we will need to ask fundamental questions of new technologies used by the application community. What is a currency, a commodity, or a security? What is meat, milk, or medicine? Do we want to have a choice in the balance of human and technological interaction (or even know) when we use a service or product?
Innovation should be a means to an end, here to serve humanity, which is not mutually exclusive with providing returns to individuals — if we are less extreme. When innovation becomes self-serving, an end unto itself for the benefit of a small group of investors and executives, we all lose in the long term (even worse, there may be no long term). In 2008, I called for planting more seeds for the future in what I thought was a mostly functional innovation ecosystem. I underestimated the problem and, unfortunately, things have not gotten better. It is no longer just about closing a gap; it is about coming into better balance with our broader ecosystems. Unicorns and utopias are not real. I do not believe we live in a simulator, but simulation or not, we must do better with what we have. We can break the spell and be disruptive in a beneficial way. Let us question inevitability and resist the pull of maximalism and extreme binary choices so that we can evolve our innovation ecosystem with the resilience to sustain humanity in increasingly challenging times.
