How we go about solving a problem depends on how far into the future it is. When the problem is around the corner, we tend to react to it. But when it’s a long time away, we seek to transform it, putting to use new opportunities that arise in the interim. In other words, on short timescales we act as if our landscape is fixed, but on long timescales we try to shape our landscape so as to allay the concern. Understanding how to balance these strategies can help us manage distant threats, such as man-made and environmental catastrophes. When multiple people act together to shape the future with the right dynamical rules in place, the path to innovative solutions can be fast-forwarded – even in the absence of explicit cooperation. We call this process collective innovation.
In this dinner hosted by the BCG Henderson Institute, we discuss strategies for acting on multiple timescales, how to respond to distant threats and collective imagination. Participants include Brian Arthur, Thomas Fink, Simon Levin, Dan Levinthal, Mihnea Moldoveanu, Michael Nielsen and Martin Reeves, as well as industry practitioners

A dinner and discussion about collective imagination, strategies for acting on multiple timescales and how to respond to distant threats.

Science and Business IV

The collective action problem describes a public good for which the benefits cannot be excluded to those who don’t contribute to it. When the benefits of the good are only realised by the next generation, as is the case with fighting climate change, the problem is compounded by the difficulties of long-term forecasting. But the situation is even more complex, because human innovation, which takes place in an expanding space of technological building blocks, is inherently hard to describe, much less predict.
In this dinner at the London Institute, we discuss innovation, technological change and new ways to combat climate change. Physicist and London Institute director Thomas Fink discusses speeding up innovation as an alternative to our current focus on environmental preservation. Technology expert and complex systems founder Doyne Farmer talks about how empirical regularities over past technological change can foretell the rate of change in the future. Building on these ideas, National Medal of Science winner Simon Levin discusses the collective action problem in climate change and how to overcome it.

A dinner and discussion about speeding up innovation, forecasting technological change and the collective action problem in climate change.

Science and Business III

Companies are composed of many individual employees that are collectively more than the sum of their parts. This super-additive aspect of companies can be thought of as a kind of organizational intelligence. Business leaders strive to build firms which are not only intelligent but can learn—and forget—new things as their goals and environments change. How do companies learn collectively and transform learning into action? How do they learn and act on multiple timescales simultaneously? 
In this dinner hosted by the BCG Henderson Institute, we discuss different aspects of intelligent organizations. Martin Reeves, Global Director at Boston Consulting Group and Director of the BCG Henderson Institute, discusses commitment and flexibility in strategy for companies and natural systems. Simon Levin, Professor in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton, talks about how "multi-clock" speed organizations act on multiple timescales. Mihnea Moldoveanu, Vice Dean of the University of Toronto School of Management, discusses learning and forgetting in the age of artificial intelligence.

A dinner and discussion about commitment and flexibility, acting on multiple timescales and learning and forgetting in the age of AI.

Science and Business II

An ecosystem is a community of species in a single habitat. Interdependencies within the ecosystem mean the fate of one species can have surprising effects on the ecosystem as a whole. In a similar way, interconnected firms make up an economic ecosystem, and many of the challenges facing it are analogous to those confronting the natural ecosystem. Examples include resilience in the face of unexpected events, the agility to handle sudden environmental change, and the risk of cascading failure leading to ecosystem collapse.
In this dinner at the London Institute, we discuss the application of biological principles to problems in business and the environment. National Academy of Sciences biologist Simon Levin talks about evolutionary strategies for tackling intractable challenges in climate change. Former Government Chief Scientific Adviser Sir John Beddington discusses lessons from ecology on mitigating risk in complex ecosystems. Shifting to current events, New York Times columnist and Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas Friedman discusses reinventing the political process using evolutionary principles.

A dinner and discussion about applying principles from evolution and ecology to seemingly intractable problems in business and politics.

Science and Business III

London 28 May 2019