Overview

• Tl;dr:
  • Come design a research program to unlock powerful materials or manufacturing technology that is too research-y to be a startup but too coordination- or engineering- heavy for a single academic lab.
• You’ll produce:
  • A network of people who are excited to work towards your vision of a technology or field that needs to be built.
  • A detailed roadmap of the specific work that needs to happen to unlock this technology. (example here)
• The project:
  • Take an idea from this list and run with it or riff on it.
  • Or pitch an idea related to our scope: big-if-true technologies in materials and manufacturing that need coordinated systems work.
• When:
  • Nine months, full time; potentially extending to up to five years to run a full program.
• Where:
  • Anywhere, but willing to travel frequently.
• Who:
  • Technologists and researchers who want to influence the trajectory of a technology beyond the scope of what a single lab or company could do. Perhaps wanting to take a break or transition.
  • e.g.
    • Someone with a PhD who got an industry job but stayed adjacent to their discipline.
    • A postdoc or professor who’s frustrated with their ability to develop an impactful system in academia.
    • Someone with experience at a funding organization who wants to push forward a technology that wasn’t in scope for their previous organization.
    • A technically-trained entrepreneur who has realized that a startup is not the best way to realize their technology vision.
• You’ll receive:
  • $10000/month.
  • Coaching on how to effectively coordinate different groups towards building a speculative but big-if-true materials or manufacturing technology.
  • Introductions to our network of researchers, businesses, and funders.
  • Potentially a full time role running the program.

Motivation

Two of Speculative Technologies’ core hypotheses are that:

1. Good technical planning matters.
2. Research management matters.

Entrepreneurial individuals are essential for executing on both of these!

Unlocking powerful research ideas that wouldn’t otherwise happen requires identifying with as much specificity as possible:

• Ideas (term used very broadly) in the “adjacent possible” of current knowledge and capabilities that people are executing on poorly or not at all.
• Why this idea is not happening (or being done poorly).
• What work needs to happen in the short-term to “unlock” the idea.
• Who should be involved in that work — both producing it, consuming it, and supporting it. At the end of the day, research is done by incredibly non-fungible people.