Three Big Ideas #36
Power struggles, pivot penalty, and being bullish on Britain
Welcome to our weekly Three Big Ideas roundup, in which we serve up a curated selection of ideas (and our takes on them) in entrepreneurship, innovation, science and technology, handpicked by the team.
⚡ Eamonn Ives, Research Director
Detractors of renewable energy love to point out that wind and solar only generate power when the conditions are right. They’re not technically wrong, but the critique is increasingly outdated. Advances in battery technology mean that greater quantities of clean energy can be stored and discharged to the grid when wind speeds are low or the sun isn’t shining.
Batteries, however, aren’t the only innovative fix to renewable power’s stop-start nature. Smart technologies that easily allow people and businesses to adjust their power consumption to times when energy is abundant are gaining in popularity. In theory, they represent a handy way to smooth out imbalances in supply and demand. Yet, according to a new paper, smart technologies should not be seen as a panacea.
Researchers ran an experiment to investigate how people respond to ‘peak events’ – periods of high-energy demand, when electricity is expensive and users are rewarded for cutting back. One group in the study was given fully automated tech that reacted to peak events without them lifting a finger. Another used app-enabled devices requiring minimal effort. A third group made manual adjustments.
What the researchers found was striking:
“[H]ouseholds with passive, automated responses reduced consumption five times more than those required to take any action at all, even when the burden is greatly reduced via smart technology. The provision of enabling technologies alone made no difference in households’ responsiveness, as compared to a fully manual setting, when active participation was still required.”
Ultimately, they conclude that the “opportunity cost of time and effort – not technology limitations – may be the fundamental obstacle to unlocking electricity demand flexibility.” Thus, if smart technologies are to play a bigger role in decarbonising the grid, this study suggests that they’ll need to be clever enough not to count on their lazy human operators.
🌀 Anastasia Bektimirova, Head of Science and Technology
A study published in Nature last week mapped 25.8 million papers and 1.7 million patents and found a “pivot penalty”: the further a work strays from its author’s prior topics, the less likely it is to land in the top-5% of citations. Papers with the smallest pivots hit that bar 7.4% of the time, while the highest-pivot papers manage it 2.2%. The pattern holds across 93% of scientific sub-fields and has grown steeper over the past five decades. Even during the COVID-19 pandemic, when scientists pivoted en masse to address urgent needs, those who ventured furthest from their established expertise faced, on average, the same penalty despite working on high-demand research. The data suggest that when researchers pivot, they pay a price that remains even in moments when pivoting is most needed.
At first glance, the pivot penalty seems to pit deep expertise against exploratory breadth. But the paper also hints that the problem is institutional. Large pivots underperform partly because outsiders struggle to penetrate new audiences and lack the conventional combinations that editorial gatekeepers reward. Researchers who step outside their established niche may face subtle hurdles: specialised communities can be sceptical of outsiders, peer reviewers may judge cross-domain work more harshly, and funding mechanisms are frequently siloed. As the study notes, the design of research culture and incentives makes major shifts difficult – from the narrow specialisation of expertise to funding systems that reward staying in one’s lane.
A lot of R&D and policy thought these days goes into the diffusion of AI-driven methodologies across science fields. But while AI-mediated knowledge networks are redrawing the established borders, those legacy patterns may be depriving science of valuable cross-pollination. In many ways, AI tools can lower the barriers for fields to interact with each other, and the less-quantitative fields can start using quantitative methods more. And on a GO-Science panel where I participated last week, a big question was around how to effectively upskill scientists at different career stages for Science in the Age of AI. That would require pivoting for some.
Efforts may falter unless we lower the pivot penalty and make breadth a feature of modern scientific careers. First, the boundaries between disciplines should be made more permeable. For example, collaborations and researcher mobility across fields should be explicitly encouraged. Second, we could treat an academic career like an investment portfolio of specialisms to develop diverse skillsets without being penalised for not having a single hyper-specialised focus. Third, we need to broaden what counts as valuable output. Developing methodological tools and software that can be used by many across different fields should be treated as first-class research outputs and not as byproducts. Two-way industry-academia exchanges are also part of the mix. Steps like these could help create a research ecosystem ready to adapt and innovate.
🇺🇦 Eamonn Ives, Research Director
This morning I had the pleasure and the privilege of talking on a panel with an audience of inspirational Ukrainian founders as part of the UK-Ukraine TechBridge. We were tasked with answering the question of “why the UK?” As I walked over to the event in the drizzling rain I could think of at least one reason why not the UK. But fortunately many more to the contrary sprung to my mind.
Critically, I think many of the main draws for entrepreneurs to Britain are things that are hard to get right. Our dense concentration of elite universities, not just in the Golden Triangle, but dotted across the length and breadth of the country, could not be conjured out of thin air. Nor too could our allure to international talent be. Our deep capital markets may not rival those in the US, but they do stand head and shoulders above Europe’s. Similarly, our language, geography, currency and legal system are blessings that could not simply be legislated for overnight.
This is not to say that Britain has challenges to overcome. But those obstacles to growth that do exist are mostly well understood and are relatively solvable. Planning policy, for instance, should be liberalised to enable the construction of more homes in productive areas, more transport connections where they are needed, and more energy assets to power the economy. Meanwhile, the tax system should be streamlined – with punishing high marginal rates eliminated so that we never disincentivise economic activity wherever possible. Regulation of emerging industries like autonomous vehicles, drones, lab-grown meat and so on should embody the spirit of ‘permissionless innovation’ to allow innovative companies to use Britain as a test-bed to roll out groundbreaking technologies.
Of course, I’m not suggesting that any of these bottlenecks could be remedied overnight. But as problems go, these aren’t necessarily bad ones to have.