V6A
What futures would you like to see?
V6A is in the business of ideas, particularly those that arrive before the institutional and cultural infrastructure to support them do. We are particularly drawn to ideas that are too early, unusual, or transdisciplinary for existing capital and institutions, however our deeper interest is in the after: what conditions and pathways allow an idea to become a more durable societal capability?
The invention of the light bulb was a engineering and scientific feat. But it wasn’t until the development of supporting infrastructure, such as public utilities, standardized voltage and current, distribution grids, and sockets and plugs, that electric light become a core societal innovation.
We do not believe there is any shortage of good ideas in the world. Our reason for being lies in the observation that society produces more innovation than it currently has the capacity to carry or fully integrate. As such we are interested in a particular bottleneck to progress:
In their landmark paper, General Purpose Technologies: Engines of Growth? (1992) Bresnahan & Trajtenberg argue that new technologies, at the time electricity and computing, only generate broad social and economic gains through “innovational complementarities”. They saw these complementarities as downstream sectors that must also be invested to develop new applications, institutional support, cultural understanding, processes, and organizational forms around the original technology, without which its full potential is left under-realized.
We believe this principle applies to modern day general purpose innovation and societal shifts, where large complementary investments in adjacent and often seemingly unrelated fields are required before an innovation’s value can be best realized. V6A’s purpose is to identify and develop support for these complementary innovations and for the meta-conditions needed that allow new ideas to be operationalized into wider societal progress.
Previously, V6A operated as an applied R&D studio focused on emerging and open-source technologies, building a network of initiatives, collaborators, and funders over the last 3 years, including the Schmidt Family Foundation/11th Hour Project, Climate-KIC, Ethereum Foundation, Metagov, EQTY Lab, 221A, New Constellations, & others.
Much of the work we led and supported were bound with strange and consequential technologies and ideas with the potential to profoundly reshape the world. Our role was to bridge the gap between these innovations and how they could be operationalized in various domains and capacities: from fund design & development to open-source agricultural technology. We brought together diverse sectors and expertise, from public to private to civic to do so.
The next iteration of V6A is now taking shape.
V6A’s long-term purpose is to widen the range of ideas and capabilities society can draw upon to meet the challenges and opportunities of our time.
What futures would you like to see? rithikha@v6acolab.org