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.
More About Us
New materials and
Manufacturing processes
01
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
02
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
Brains Coordinated Research Accelerator
Brains is a 13-week, part-time program to provide the skills and opportunities to translate ambitious research visions that aren’t a good fit for a company but are too big for a single academic lab into impact.
Think YCombinator for coordinated research programs.
Learn More
Cell-Free Manufacturing
Led By: Quentin Dudley
By pulling enzymes, substrates, and cofactors out of organisms and into a bioreactor, we can take advantage of metabolic pathways to sustainably convert harvested sugar or even carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into useful molecules quickly and efficiently instead of deriving them from petroleum.This program aims to expand the scale and scope of cell-free manufacturing, both of which are currently limited.
Stimuli-Responsive Manufacturing
Led By: Tim McGee
Natural materials, like spider silk, dramatically outperform synthetic materials in multiple dimensions.
It might be possible to build systems that use the same mechanisms a s biology to build high performance fibers and materials that are currently unachievable while simultaneously making existing processes more sustainable.
ARIA collaboration
Spectech is creating a soon-to-be-public library of resources on how to run coordinated research programs, in collaboration with the UK’s ARIA (Advanced Research + Invention Agency). We believe that it’s possible to make this career more accessible by codifying the critical skills and mindsets that go into leading these programs. We are also creating a complementary 1:1 mentoring program for ARIA’s programme directors.
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.
Macromolecular Additive Manufacturing
Macromolecular Additive Manufacturing could lead to new multi-component proteins made from up to one hundred distinct parts, which would be over a ten-fold increase versus what can be made routinely with living cells. The technology could unlock artificial ‘antibodies’ that engage several targets simultaneously, vaccines made from multiple parts of infectious agents for robust immunity to many pathogens, or rapid prototyping of cell-free factories to synthesize chemicals with spatially organized enzymes.
Learn More
Current Programs
Brains Coordinated Research Accelerator
Brains is a 13-week, part-time program to provide the skills and opportunities to translate ambitious research visions that aren’t a good fit for a company but are too big for a single academic lab into impact.
Think YCombinator for coordinated research programs.
Learn More
Cell-Free Manufacturing
Led By: Quentin Dudley
By pulling enzymes, substrates, and cofactors out of organisms and into a bioreactor, we can take advantage of metabolic pathways to sustainably convert harvested sugar or even carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into useful molecules quickly and efficiently instead of deriving them from petroleum.This program aims to expand the scale and scope of cell-free manufacturing, both of which are currently limited.
Stimuli-Responsive Manufacturing
Led By: Tim McGee
Natural materials, like spider silk, dramatically outperform synthetic materials in multiple dimensions.
It might be possible to build systems that use the same mechanisms a s biology to build high performance fibers and materials that are currently unachievable while simultaneously making existing processes more sustainable.
Aria Collaboration
Spectech is creating a soon-to-be-public library of resources on how to run coordinated research programs, in collaboration with the UK’s ARIA (Advanced Research + Invention Agency). We believe that it’s possible to make this career more accessible by codifying the critical skills and mindsets that go into leading these programs. We are also creating a complementary 1:1 mentoring program for ARIA’s programme directors.
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.
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.
The Right People with the Right Ideas.
Subscribe to our newsletter to stay in the loop.
