What should UK innovation, ARIA, look at

Weird manifesto for UK ARPA or ARIA

My ideas:

-Progress Studies (including social progress and creativity)

-Basic Climate research

-How creativity happens

-Productivity schedules (sleep, diet, schedules)

-Educational Mastery

-Building Speed (how to do big projects fast[er])

-Healthcare speed, innovation, public health challenge trials,

The UK is creating a £800m sciency agency based on the US ARPA* an innovation agency. The UK agency will be called ARIA, Advanced Research and Invention Agency. This idea had considerable backing from former special adviser Dominic Cummings (see his lengthy blogs on this, links end*). While it has received criticism and isn’t a novel idea in innovation circles, we have it. So let’s make the most of it.

What is ARPA?

In brief at ARPA, around 100 program managers (PMs) with ~5 year appointments create and run programs to pursue high-level visions, for instance - what would make electric planes or hydrogen heating systems.

There is much written on what makes US DARPA work with a decent focus on having brilliant PMs. Also the similarities and differences on how IARPA (intelligence focused) and ARPA-E (energy focused) have also worked. So, I won’t dwell on that. 

UK’s ARIA is likely to be given the freedom to choose what it works on. Let’s put aside the debates on ARIA and the long history of innovation policy experts here and posit what we think ARIA should work on.

I’d like to float some weird and not so weird ideas I think a UK ARIA should focus on. I have a touch of weirdness about me so that fully qualifies me (tongue in cheek).

These ideas support areas which would have large public goods benefits (and some private sector benefits) but for various incentive/time horizon problems are not well suited to private actors.

I have 3 large buckets but with some off sub-buckets.

•  Basic Climate research

•  Progress Studies (after Cowen & Collinson)

•  Healthcare (life extension and quality of life extension)

Basic Climate research: Trees and Seas 

While this falls under “net zero” area, my idea under basic climate research is more foundational than eg tackling hydrogen based systems for making carbon neutral steel.

There are several areas here, where - it seems to me - we simply do not understand the state of the world and its system but we might now have the technology and research to do this.

For instance, what is the true state of our forests, jungles and trees over the globe? Data and the interpretation of that data is unclear. Where are trees disappearing, where are we planting and how is it going?

Bill Gates is dismissive of trees as a climate solution*. The UN FAO has data, visualised by World in Data*, but other attempts to assess trees are contradictory.

This is due to problems of classifying types of trees (shrubs, types of trees etc.) and the aerial data needed. And there are problems with losing old trees (especially primary rain forest) and replacement of new trees.

I am far away from the literature and no expert but I sense a programme here and maybe one specific to UK and UK peat lands, tree afforestation etc. would be very useful in basic research.  Essentially, the same argument for seas and oceans and their contribution to carbon sinks.

Basic climate research is not super weird. But I think there are big basic knowledge gaps here which could be very valuable and items like trees are not best suited to private actors.

Progress Studies

• How innovation happens, how to make it better. Same for social and ethical progress. Also,

• Creativity, flow, educational mastery

This is weirder although Tyler Cowen, Patrick Collinson et al is making it a lot less weird.

This would need to go beyond “Cities and innovation clusters show agglomeration affects” (known and somewhat trite, IMO, in that difficult for policy to seeming build upon) but can we drive real insights here? Small teams? Big teams? Collaboration from cross-disciplines which are neither too far, nor too close. The impacts from regulation (are the de-regulation cries correct in all respects? ). 

There will be a tendency to look at this in the hard sciences and the inventions, innovations etc. there (and there is a literature here). And I think understanding that will be useful especially eg in medical science, software and the like, but my weird question is what about social progress?

There is consensus today that slavery is bad. I think that counts as social progress. But how does that happen? What role does “culture” play?

I think society is increasingly valuing eg autistic thinking and (while there is much further to go), we have given some more rights and some more status to the spectrum of autistic thinking and other areas like this.

I think some rigorous work here would be insightful and useful. If the productivity or progress can be raised in these areas there could be strong benefits.

Running along side this, I’d be interested in rigorous work on Team and Individual productivity progress.

There could be an enormous win if robust findings could be confirmed here.

For example, Paul Graham (extremely successful in the start-up founder and investment space) has argued that maker time and manager time are very different schedules.

Essentially, maker time requires good lengths of the day devoted to the creative projects  (in my view, related to what we know about flow) whereas manager time needs shorter chunks of meeting time.

Where manager time interferes with maker time, you get a huge negative impact to maker productivity.

If this is correct and if we can guide for it, this could improve productivity and be of general benefit. Would this be progress? I think so, and of general public good. Why are there so many time management books? Tyler Cowen amongst others often asks about people’s “personal productivity function” ?  Can we actually discover anything robust here?

Let’s go one step further, we seem to have some tentative ideas about sleep and productive circadian rhythms of the day for certain people (eg night owls).

We have tentative ideas about intermittent fasting or diet and potential health benefits.

Is there any work on trying to combine these factors or ideas? 

If you current have poor productivity, but what you should do is change to a nightowl, maker schedule on an intermittent fasting schedule - could your productivity significantly increase?

And then how about combining this within teams? There is work on psychological safety*, and some thoughts as to  innovation seems to happen when teams understand each other’s work but are not too close or not too far away - but can we combine any of these possible insights?

From this can we create even more builder teams, like the Tesla’s, Stripes., etc of the world.

Perhaps it is too abstract and too difficult to do rigorously, but I think this would be a weirdly good area for UK ARPA to examine.

As extension, I’d look in to how we foster creativity. Specifically, I’d be interested in extending the work around “flow” and any rigorous study on the structure of “story” or “narratives”. And also an examination of forms of “educational mastery” 

Flow

Why flow? There is some suggestion that flow can significantly increase creative productivity (although there might be downsides in using flow to enter practice states that don’t lead to new development). Rigourous work around here that might be more widely applied could have strong benefits. Same for overall creativity.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, 2013) has done work here but can it be extended and made wider known? If it can raise the creativeness of our top 20% (or anyone) could there be huge gains?

Drama and story

The basis of most (western) dramatic structure was written by Aristotle in his poetics around 330 BCE - so over 2300 years ago. While we have had some incremental changes and Shakespeare arguably stepped up this form there are a couple of way of thinking about this. One is that drama and story has been stagnating for a long time but another is that there is something fundamental about story structure that has persisted over centuries (maybe something Lindy? As Taleb might say)

Given the way that story/narrative/myth seems to really impact human behaviour (intersubjective myth for instance) and in world where humans might benefit being resistant to mis-information - I think there could be good gains from a rigourous study here.

Thinkers like Ray Dalio put strong weight on the hero quest story arcs in life and my weird suggestion is that a study around what we know about “story” as a social science exercise  would be insightful. 

This is probably too leftfield for them, but my next idea could be more mainstream and that is an examination of “educational mastery” especially in the context of online or Khan academy type innovations.

Educational Mastery

Patrick Collinson writes: “Educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom found that one-on-one tutoring using mastery learning led to a two sigma(!) improvement in student performance. The results were replicated. He asks in his paper that identified the "2 Sigma Problem": how do we achieve these results in conditions more practical (i.e., more scalable) than one-to-one tutoring?

In a related vein, this large-scale meta-analysis shows large (>0.5 Cohen's d) effects from direct instruction using mastery learning.

Is this a true effect and can we do more about it? Can it scale using online methods? 1-1 video ? Or if not, is there value to eg. randomly (or not) selecting some students and giving them mastery type learning. If just these small groups have two sigma improvements - could we see some significant gains?

I think ARPA could well study something in this area.  Nintil* did a thorough research round up suggesting the Bloom effect was not as large. But, 1-1 teaching did have a very robust effect. 

We could find a number of people willing to give 1-1 teaching as extra and maybe a number of students (across high performing or medium/low performing groups). If 1-1 can dramatically improve performance would this be worth studying or working on?

Building faster

Lastly, in this area it would be useful to examine why we seemed to be able to build infrastructure and certain other items faster 50 years ago. First, how true is this? UK managed to build Olympic sites in a moderately fast time frame but not eg. the tube extensions. This might not exactly be an ARPA area, but I think it could under pin a lot of innovation. (cf again Cowen, Collinson).

I think there’s an enormous amount that we do better, but can we learn from where we had speed before. Are there robust findings here? Or it just a nice to think venture capital thing.

My last huge area is on healthcare. 

Healthcare progress

I would also suggest there is work done on studying healthcare progress. Now there is a huge literature here, but I see less in a cross-disciplinary nature. This is intersectional with some other ideas here, but it would be what discoveries have most improved human health and how can we have more of them? What are the barriers or not.

Hand washing, weight control, diet, exercise and other low cost interventions are known but how best to synthesise this and can it be combined with newer technolofy and how intersectional with the social determinats of health?

This area will be a focus areas coming off the pandemic, but there is - to my reading - limited work on synthesing how best human health can be improved and the barriers to it.

And this is because of the incentives of where the private sector will focus its innovation and capture public good improvements or not. 

There are potentially very strong and perhaps moderately easy wins here. Two areas would be cost/benefits of areas of drug regulation. The UK has a particular opportunity here.

For instance, it could use EMEA and US  regulatory equivalence but go further and decide to approve certain medications quicker than those regulators. ( I think patient choice could be interesting here, post phase II and/or safety studies)

The UK could extend ideas it has started on “challenge trials” to see if this could significantly speed up areas of therapy development. There are areas probably more areas suitable for challenge trials and areas less suitable and not only COVID. ARIA could run a programme assessing and potentially funding some of this.  

Where would the cost/benefits of challenge trials help the UK/World in certain disease areas?

ARIA could go beyond narrow areas of regulation and even challenge trials but try an synthesis areas of public health.

Can robust work be done on how eg digital health data combined with preventative interventions could make huge, inexpensive, health interventions.   I think this could be a huge area. Many pilot trials have started (eg see a lot of the work Optum do) but some rigorous programmes here could be of enormous value.

In sum, we have ARIA. Let it explore some weird ideas. A few more transformational weird ideas would be a good thing and won’t displace all the other R&D things we are doing.

Links:

Dominic Cummings blog

On trees, World in Data but here on the conflicts in the data and conflicting data here.

Paul Graham, maker time

On Flow: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, 2013

Nintil on educational mastery

Patrick Collinson, fast things. And Cowen and Collinson on Progress Studies. 

Policy Exchange: https://policyexchange.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/Visions-of-Arpa.pdf

ON ARPA https://benjaminreinhardt.com/wddw

Where did UK science go?

Where did all the science go? Can ARPA bring it back.

-I suggest there will be no more big UK life science companies

-Network agglomeration effects are important

-An UK ARPA and its location should be placed carefully

-I suggest we need more innovation in institutions

Take $8.5 billion? No. Take $10 billion? No. Gilead, in 2017, bidding against itself, paid $11.9 billion to acquire Kite Pharmaceuticals.  I am sad because Kite may have developed into a $40bn, maybe $100bn, market capitalisation company over time, and now we will never know.

The same goes for the UK’s Shire. Takeda Pharmaceuticals completed its $59bn takeover in 2019.

Kite Pharmaceuticals is a small biopharmaceutical company focused on cancer therapies and CAR-T (chimeric antigen receptors T-Cell) technology. As of January 2017, Kite had a market capitalisation of $3bn and it had its IPO (initial public offering)  in 2014. Gilead had to raise its bid several times before Kite’s board succumbed. The boards and shareholders of smaller companies such as Kite and Shire are unlikely to be able to resist cashing out to dollar-rich, large drug makers. Gilead’s management indicated limited value was attributed to CAR-T success in solid tumors or Kite’s earlier stage technology.

This trend is intriguing as it suggests that the new creation of large biopharmaceutical companies organically from small ones may seldom happen again. Certainly, it seems unlikely that the UK will create another  bio-pharmaceutical powerhouse such as GlaxoSmithKline or AstraZeneca. Shire was the last likely candidate and now it has gone to Takeda. The US might still establish a new one.

I posit the reasons are threefold: the UK has under-invested and continues to under-invest in science and innovation; the network and agglomeration effect where scientists creatively clash to form new ideas is diminished in the UK as a whole, and, as I described earlier, large, cash-rich global biopharma companies are now in the habit of acquiring their smaller peers before they grow large.

This has negative long-term implications for UK science and private wealth creation. Private company inventions often rely on publicly-funded research ideas as the initial spark. Development is costly, risky and seemingly not well suited to publicly funded enterprise.

I’ve heard investors speak of the Chomsky trade, after Noam Chomsky, which suggest if you want to know what’s worth investing in, look at what US federal research funding organisations, like DARPA or the National Institutes of Health (NIH), are investing in today, and then go long.  

DARPA—the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency— was established in the late 1950s to accelerate development of U.S. satellite technology. Research at DARPA led to a number of breakthroughs, including GPS technology and the Internet. The inventions at Kite were based on ideas first formed by Dr Steven Rosenberg at the NIH. Kite fits the Chomsky trade.

Sir John Bell recognised this value in his Life Sciences: Industrial Strategy report for the UK government (August 2017, green paper). Bell proposed an Health Advanced Research Programme (HARP) which looks to be modelled on the US DARPA, and suggested ideas to reinforce the UK science value proposition. Bell sees the NHS as a source of value particularly in the data sets that it owns on behalf of UK patients.  Bell suggests a strategic goal for the NHS to engage in 50 collaborative projects with the life science industry over the next five years ranging from late-stage clinical trials to large-scale data analysis and evaluation of medical technology and diagnostics. 

I can think of at least three large technology companies who could use health population data analytics to transform the UK health service. The UK has a unique and valuable healthcare data asset because of everyone’s singular NHS number. The majority of the UK population already gives away its data, if only we could be persuaded to use our data as a force for good.

This will be relevant in any discussion of a UK DARPA equivalent for energy as well.

“Ben, none of my neuroscience colleagues want to work in the UK. Not even Cambridge University and the like. Funding is 50% lower, salaries are 50% lower, there are many interesting labs in the US or China. We will not come to the UK,” one of the world’s leading neuroscientists under 40 years old told me. There are several cutting-edge science labs in the UK but post-graduates and professors, if they have a choice, are joining US labs; or increasingly settling in China.  The US government risks this innovation too with possible cuts to the NIH.

Scientists (in a now closed Pfizer lab) in Sandwich, UK, discovered that experimental heart drug UK92480 had a specific side effect on male subjects - plenty of erections. Viagra was born. Serendipity came into play, much like it did in 1928 when Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin as a result of mould falling on his petri dish.  Black Swan author, Nassim Taleb, has advocated for the need for randomness in drug discovery. As Google scientists have noted, creative ideas happen around ‘focused serendipity’. A network effect from sharing and debating new scientific ideas tends to happen round hubs and those hubs are in short supply in the UK. 

Arguably, Cambridge, and the South East of the UK, has a hub. A Cambridge-Oxford-London (with the EU drug regulator, EMEA, formerly in London) triangle has possibilities. Brexit has ended the London location of EMEA and Cambridge is still nothing like the huge biopharmaceutical hubs of Boston or California in the US. Senior management at Genentech mentioned to me that there are over 250 biotechs currently in the south San Francisco area alone. Research networks are important intangible assets for a country.  The lack of UK hubs, combined with the paucity of leading scientists and fewer occasions for serendipity, discourages the discovery, nurture and growth of fledgling biopharmaceutical companies. In economist speak it’s all about the agglomeration effect (or lack of) of networks.

In this regard UK Brexit is unhelpful. For all Brexiteers’ talk of trade, isolation dampens creative networks. More damaging is the time and energy spent on figuring out Brexit and its aftermath that could otherwise be spent working out how best to support and nurture UK science. Hopefully Bell's proposal will not be lost in the Brexit noise. There is also the cost of UK institutions losing EU funding, which is likely to be substantial. If the UK government materially increased funding in science  (perhaps using Bells' HARP modelled on the USA’s DARPA) this would be an investment for long-term gain, with the value felt over generations (penicillin, for example, was a 1920s discovery which we continue to benefit from.) This could be investment worth borrowing for.

Turning to using Brexit as a force for good, the UK government seems to be contemplating a UK version of ARPA. The UK Policy Exchange has argued “ARPA should focus on developing advanced technology on a 10-15 year horizon.  Unlocking transformative technologies, rather than basic research or incremental near-to-market innovation, is where ARPA’s efforts should be centred and ARPA must embrace failure.” One can argue whether these are easy words and how implementation of a culture that can learn from failure or understand how transformational research happens (it often relies on basic research and can also rely on combining inventions across fields in novel ways). Still, one aspect missing from this vision is any argument over place and agglomeration (the word agglomeration does not appear in the report). To this end, I would rely on the work of Tom Forth, Stian Westlake (co-author of Capitalism without Capital) and others to suggest that the geographic placement of ARPA to catalyse stronger innovation agglomeration effects is vital. ARPA will be too small in itself to catalyse a whole network, if it is placed far away from current networks (see also the Office for National Statistics’ move to Newport, far away from hubs), but if it is placed in the London triangle, an opportunity will be missed to strengthen networks outside of the South East. Losing much of the AstraZeneca science in the north of England over the last few years was a national calamity in this regard. 

I argue that an UK ARPA or,  even better, both an energy focused ARPA-E and a health based HARPA, would be powerful long-term investments for the UK to make. Politically, it would meet aims of “State Capacity Libertarians” and also innovation elements of “Green New Deal”. A focus on innovation and experimenting with novel research is to be recommended. Its geographic placement in order to benefit from and catalyse agglomeration effects should not be underestimated.

I further argue we must be much more experimental in types of institution, forms of institution and how institutions might spur innovation. Reading Colin Mayer’s Prosperity, and exploring economic historians’ work it seems we used to have more forms of institution, corporate bodies and people trying to achieve innovation through various organisations. Today we seem more ossified. Sure, we have ideas on charter cities and the like but shouldn’t there be more competing big ideas? Maybe there are and I am missing them. Still, I argue there should be many, many more.

Psychologists, such as Daniel Kahneman, show humans are often poor at making good long-term investment decisions. I am not confident the UK will invest sufficiently. There’s always still hope from serendipity. 

Follow Benjamin Yeoh, @benyeohben

His microgrants programme (£1k for positive impact) is open www.thendobetter.com/grants

References:

Policy Exchange: https://policyexchange.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/Visions-of-Arpa.pdf

@stianwestlake

@thomasforth

On State Capacity Libertarianism, see @tylercowen 

On Prosperity, Colin Mayer - blog here. Microsoft CEO recently noted this has reformed his view of business in capitalism and society.