About "A New Science of Venture Building" framework
The first in a series or articles describing the core and reason of the topic that got me starting this whole thing.
Most frameworks in the innovation and venture space are methodologies: step-by-step processes that tell you what to do in what order. This is not one of those. It is a lens - a set of foundational principles that change what you see when you look at a venture opportunity, an innovation function, or a capital structure. The difference matters, because the problem with the existing methodologies is not that people are executing them badly. It is that they are built on assumptions that have stopped being true.
The framework is the result of more than twenty years of experience that is, to put it plainly, unusual in its breadth. Almost nobody has been an entrepreneur with exits and a VC partner and a designer of national innovation ecosystems and a university lecturer - and done all of these seriously, in parallel, over an extended period. Each domain has its own received wisdom, its own blind spots, and its own way of framing what the problem is. Operating across all of them simultaneously produces a vantage point that is genuinely difficult to get any other way: you see where the frameworks contradict each other, where one domain has solved what another is still struggling with, and where the consensus in each field is held together more by convention than by evidence.
The framework emerged from that vantage point. It is not a synthesis of existing approaches - it is a departure from them, grounded in the evidence that those approaches have, collectively, failed to improve the outcomes they were designed to improve. It draws on the philosophy of science, on economic history, on organisational theory, and on the accumulated pattern recognition of having been inside the machine in several different roles. It has been tested in practice, across geographies and sectors, and it keeps producing insights that the standard frameworks miss.
The framework is the lens through which everything on this site is written. The analysis, the arguments, the occasional provocations — all of it is pilot waves seen through that lens. If the pieces here read differently from most of what is published on innovation and venture building, that is why.