The Many Models of Structured Innovation

Innovation Loves Chaos - but Chaos can't Maintain Innovation

Creativity has always been the art of rephrasing rules — of circumventing certainty, of pushing, extending, and refusing to let paradigms set the limits of imagination. It is a uniquely human endeavour, restless and constructive, and it has served us well — in most parts — for several millennia.

So much so that we now have entire branches of government dedicated to funding it. In the United Kingdom, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) oversees UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the agency charged with “building a thriving, inclusive research and innovation system that connects discovery to prosperity and public good.”

Other nations have built their own architectures around creativity and innovation: Germany has the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft; the United States fields the National Science Foundation (NSF) and its network of National Laboratories.

In 2022, the UK made a bold addition to this landscape: the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) — a small, high-stakes experiment in scientific risk-taking, designed to fund ideas with the potential for genuine paradigm shifts.

Germany, too, has begun to experiment with new structures for risk. In 2019, the Federal Government founded SPRIND — the Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation — charged with pursuing Sprunginnovationen, or “leap innovations.” Unlike traditional research funders, SPRIND operates with greater autonomy and flexibility, bridging the gap between public accountability and private agility. Its recent collaboration with Renaissance Philanthropy signals an even bolder step: the fusion of public mission with philanthropic risk capital — a hybrid model that could reshape Europe’s approach to high-impact innovation.

Discovery Dies within the Confines of Shareholder Value

Innovation has never been efficient. It is, by its very nature, exploratory, wasteful, and sometimes embarrassing. The more we demand predictability and quarterly returns, the more we drain its vitality.

The large pharmaceutical and biotech industries, once laboratories of genuine curiosity, have become risk-averse custodians of shareholder comfort. Research pipelines are pruned for market readiness, not for intellectual audacity. One only has to look at the pioneering work of Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman — whose discoveries on mRNA modification underpinned the most recent generation of vaccines — to glimpse the structural inertia that grips big pharma.

Too many innovation leaders still place control and loyalty over curiosity. In their hands, research becomes a management exercise rather than a creative act — a performance of compliance rather than of discovery. When science is treated solely as an asset class, its horizon narrows to the next earnings call.

That doesn’t mean commerce is the enemy of discovery — only that discovery needs the air of unconstrained thought to flourish.

Structuring the Frontier

What Europe, through its public networks and distributed funding models, still offers is a counterbalance: the possibility of pursuing knowledge that may never yield a product, but might one day redefine what a product even means.

Such is the case with the innovation ecosystem that has grown out of Europe over the past decades.

At its heart lies a quietly powerful network — the International Association of Science Parks and Areas of Innovation (IASP) — connecting hundreds of campuses, research clusters, and technology parks across more than eighty countries worldwide. These are the connective tissues of international innovation: places where universities, startups, and institutes coexist — where ideas can mature before they are monetised.

Their strength lies not in scale or spectacle, but in continuity — in the steady circulation of talent, trust, and time.

Innovation in the Arc of Tension between Architecture and Impulse

If the IASP represents the quiet architecture of innovation, Agnes von Matuschka, CEO of the Potsdam Science Park and Regional President of the European Division of IASP, gives it a voice. She speaks of innovation not as competition but as continuity — as an ecosystem of trust in which ideas grow through proximity, patience, and shared purpose. Under her stewardship, the Potsdam Science Park has become a model for how scientific depth, entrepreneurial energy, and civic responsibility can coexist within a single landscape.

By contrast, meet Anthony Finbow, Faculty Member at the Guy Foundation for Quantum Biology and Entrepreneur in Residence at Founders at the University of Cambridge. A long-time champion of translational science, he embodies the opposite pole — the restless drive toward the frontier. His world is one of high-stakes translation, where the challenge is not to protect the ecosystem but to push through its boundaries. He argues that Europe’s next leap will depend on weaving that audacity into its fabric — risk within resonance.

Between them lies the balance every innovation system must strike: continuity and disruption, trust and risk, the architecture and the impulse. Europe’s advantage may yet be that it knows how to hold both — to structure the frontier without restraining it.