In this interview, Dr. CJ Meadows discusses his concept of lateral innovation—creating high‑value breakthroughs by connecting ideas across organizational silos, industries, and disciplines. He illustrates the principle with the silk‑based vaccine stabilization story, where silk fibroin creates a shelf‑stable matrix for vaccines, potentially eliminating the costly cold‑chain and expanding global immunization coverage. Meadows extends the analogy to "fusion," likening the merging of disparate ideas to nuclear fusion that releases energy, and argues that such cross‑disciplinary integration must start with individuals discovering their curiosities and values. He advocates for education systems that nurture curiosity‑led experimentation and for social policies like Universal Basic Income (UBI) that give people the freedom to pursue mission‑driven ventures. Finally, he contrasts innovation ecosystems, noting that resource‑rich environments like Singapore may dampen necessity‑driven creativity, whereas scarcity in parts of Africa can spark novel solutions.
Chapters
Can you tell me a bit more about your work in lateral innovation, lateral thinking? I believe that's the work you do with i2i, am I right?
Fertile ground for high-value innovation lies between your organizational silos, between industries, between fields, between a lot of things.
Could you give me some examples, possibly, for our viewers especially, and for me? Sure. Any work that's been done in lateral innovation or lateral thinking that you think are relevant or interesting?
Absolutely. One of the stories I wrote about is silk vaccines. So Livio Valenti, he worked with United Nations and he was sent to Cambodia to try and help them move up the value curve, you know, develop the industry with higher value silk products. And doing this kind of conventional thing unfortunately didn't work. So he decided to go back to school and just to keep searching for what would work, what would make an impact. He stumbled upon a TED Talk by Dr. Fio Omenetto about— he's a materials scientist and he was talking about the use of silk for a whole variety of things. And Fio had made a discovery whereby they left a film slide, and they'd been introducing biologicals into these silk slides. It was in a drawer for a long period of time, and it did not degrade. One of the things that came out of, of his discovery was to put fibroin, or silk fiber solution, into vaccines. It creates a matrix around biological compounds which makes them shelf-stable. They don't degrade. So why is this important? In a $20 billion industry, vaccination, $16 billion is taken up by refrigeration, the cold chain distribution channels. Now, if you don't need refrigeration anymore, all of those resources can be put to better use and you can get vaccines out to people. 20% of the world doesn't receive basic vaccinations, 50% of children in some places. This could save millions and millions of lives.
In this scenario though, it would be more looking for solutions to problems in one vertical in another.
If you learn about something and then go on to another field, another country, another whatever, you're gonna see things differently from everyone over there. You'll bring ideas in that could revolutionize what is done. And as a matter of fact, the key thing about innovation is not only— not only can you create powerful innovations by connecting things from different fields, different technologies, whatever, but to bring the innovation to the world is cross-disciplinary by its nature.
There we go. It's all about really getting the right people at the right place at the right time.
You need the elements and you need to know how to integrate. You need to know how to create fusion. And that's the core concept, as a matter of fact, of fusion. In nuclear fusion, two nuclei come together, form a new one, and release a great deal of energy into the world. But likewise, in business, science and technology, and the arts and humanities, two ideas, two technologies, two whatevers, two industries can come together form something new and release a great deal of value into the world.
So how do we integrate this into education? We seem to be stuck in an archaic method and yet have these requirements and have defined this need for integration in new learning systems.
Again, it starts with the individual. We need to help people discover who they are, how they're designed, what they're curious in, what they value, what they would want to do. There's a great deal of experimentation that needs to happen, and it should be led by curiosity. We need to allow for that and help people pursue these different avenues, but we need to help them create the synergies, the integration that will create something new.
It must also come, I guess, from a government's perspective or a social support perspective. Scandinavian countries were introducing a trial for UBI, Universal Basic Income, where people have the liberty of discovering what they want to do. Yes. What they're really good at without having to worry about how to survive.
Yes. You know, UBI is one of my favorite topics as well. I think it is a fantastic thing. It gets people started on what they feel is their life mission regardless of of the economic impact. However, I also have questions because new venture creation and entrepreneurship is hard. It's not a hobby for fun. Yes, a higher mission is a very, very good reason for that. But some rewards at the end of it beyond UBI I guess most UBI systems include the possibility of such rewards.
It's interesting you say that. I had a discussion a few days ago with the head of an accelerator in Singapore.
Yeah.
Who did bring up that the ease of access to solutions and say the relatively simple, or sorry, straightforward life we have in Singapore almost inhibits innovation. Whereas I've been to North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, and where the lack of basic things drives people to find solutions that no one would have come up with otherwise.
No one innovates if there's no need.
It is—
In short. You know, I created— I came back here 4 or 5 years ago to create this innovation lab. I had created another innovation lab in the dot-com days, year 2000, here for partner labs in like London, New York, etc. And we noticed that this one was a little different. There was extremely low unemployment. Everybody wanted a corporate job. Nobody wanted to do venture anything. And the ecosystem and the desire, the push for that, just kind of something was missing. Even though the government was as noisy then as it is now. Now we have more unemployment. We have more people who are frustrated with the way industrial-age corporations work, and they want different lives. A lot of these are millennials. And they have ease of access to new technologies that make the— what they want to build a lot easier to build. I notice a change in the education system and the people. I see a lot more creativity and problem-solving capability here now than a generation ago when I was teaching at NUS. So there have been some changes in the society and changes in the economy, as well as some really wonderful government initiatives that have made it more likely that something's gonna happen here now.
