Science is being rebuilt for the 21st century. AI-augmented research teams, new institutional structures, and tools now let small groups tackle problems that once required massive bureaucracies. But the infrastructure of science is still anchored in the 20th century.

Speculative Technologies is creating the missing infrastructure: new scientific career paths, funding mechanisms, and organizational models. We help create weirdly shaped projects and ensure they find a home.

Our biggest focus is on people and organizations running coordinated research programs: ambitious, goal-directed scientific work with opinionated leadership – work that can take years and dozens of people before producing any legible results. Programs like these have unlocked everything from the Internet to mRNA vaccines, but starting and running them has been uncommon and often ad-hoc. We’re changing that: we created the Research Leader’s Playbook – used by both government and private organizations; started Brains – the first training program for the scientists who lead these programs; and coined the term “coordinated research program” to pull together a disparate community.

Closing the gaps and creating the 21st-century science ecosystem will take many organizations, so we work for the ecosystem too: nurturing, building community around, and advocating for a Cambrian explosion of different kinds of research organizations.