Humanity

Needs New

Frontiers

Speculative technologies is a nonprofit research organization that runs coordinated research programs to unlock big-if-true technologies that are too speculative to be a startup but are too coordination- or engineering-heavy for academia alone.

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New materials and

Manufacturing processes

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We focus on new paradigms in materials and manufacturing. While these areas aren’t the first that come to mind when you think of the world's biggest problems, new materials and manufacturing processes consistently enable us to solve problems and create abundance in ways we couldn’t even have imagined.

We call them the bronze, copper, iron, steam, and silicon ages for a reason.

Filling gaps in the

Research ecosystem

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We’re experimenting with new institutional structures for doing research. Aspirationally blazing a trail for others to do the same.

Different institutions support different flavors of research work: startups, corporate labs, and academia all do important work. But there are gaps in this ecosystem that prevent many critical technologies from going from imagination to reality.

Our model revolves around two core concepts:

Empowered program managers and coordinated research programs

Program Managers

Our organization revolves around program managers with deep technical expertise and a clear vision of a capabilities that don’t yet exist along with a technology that can enable them. We help them roadmap out what needs to happen in order to create that technology and then empower them to coordinate projects across several organizations towards that single goal.

Coordinated Research Programs

Our program managers run three- to five-year research programs composed of several projects across multiple organizations. Each successful program goes through three major stages: program design, proof-of-concept experiments, and then the main program itself.

Current Programs
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Nanomodular Electronics

Led By: Michael Filler

Nanomodular electronics is creating a new process for manufacturing microelectronics that are customizable down to the transistor, use a plethora of materials, and can be made on-demand without etching silicon or requiring a massive, expensive facility. By creating tiny, modular components separately from laying them down and wiring them together, we could make custom microelectronics as easily as printing this document.

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Molecular Additive Manufacturing

Led By: Chris Wintersinger

Molecular additive manufacturing is creating heterogeneous materials whose structures can be specified down to nanoscale building blocks, potentially enabling us to engineer structures we depend on biology for today. By templating a precise pattern of covalently bonded proteins, polymers, and inorganic molecules, we could create powerful catalysts, membranes to easily filter water, and take the first steps on the path towards atomically precise manufacturing.

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The Right People with the Right Ideas.

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© 2023 Speculative Technologies.
Created by And–Now and Anson Yu.