Speculative Technologies and Unbundling the University

A Conversation with Ben Reinhardt

April 15, 2025

This interview is the second in a series exploring questions of research and innovation, in Denmark and abroad. The series is linked to my ongoing effort to map two emerging fields, Decentralized Science (DeSci) and Metascience. While Metascience as a concept is not new, a new wave of activity has appeared — one that is explicitly focused not only on analyzing existing systems, but on building new organizational forms, funding models, and ways of doing research. Both fields attempt to reform and reinvent how we organize, fund, and disseminate scientific and technological work, and I believe there is much to learn from these emerging efforts.

In this edition, I spoke with Ben Reinhardt, founder and CEO of Speculative Technologies — a nonprofit industrial research lab focused on developing materials and manufacturing technologies that do not fit comfortably into startups, universities, or traditional government programs. Beyond his practical work building new research programs, Ben has also contributed important thinking on the structural problems of the current R&D ecosystem, and the need for a greater diversity of institutional models. In this conversation, we explore his path to founding Speculative Technologies, the challenges of working around university-centered research systems, and his broader vision for unbundling the university and building a more modular and experimental research ecosystem.

Bio: Ben Reinhardt is the founder of Speculative Technologies, a nonprofit research lab reimagining how society funds and conducts R&D with a focus on materials and manufacturing. He has spent time in Silicon Valley and Singapore at startups and VC firms and holds a PhD in space robotics from Cornell University.

Introduction

David Hilmer Rex
Can you introduce yourself, and highlight how your interest in the structural dimension of research ecosystems came about?

Ben Reinhardt
I'm Ben Reinhardt. I'm the CEO of Speculative Technologies, which I would describe as a nonprofit industrial research lab. We're focused on technologies, particularly in materials and manufacturing, that do not have a home in other institutions. They are too researchy to be a startup, but too coordination- or engineering-heavy to be in an academic lab.

I came to this through being unsatisfied with a series of existing institutions that I thought were supposed to enable the technologies of the future. I did my PhD in space robotics, where I ran into all the constraints of academia. I worked briefly at NASA and saw the constraints of government research. Then I went to Silicon Valley, worked at a startup, and saw what happens to potentially amazing technology when you raise a lot of money and are under pressure to get a product out quickly.

I thought I could do it better myself, started a startup, and experienced the constraints of what you can actually raise money for and the promises you have to make. Then I became a VC and discovered that there were constraints on VCs themselves; they have LPs and need to make returns. I worked briefly in Singapore, thinking maybe working outside the US would help — but of course found that there are constraints there too.

Eventually I came to this conclusion: we actually need new institutions for supporting this very fuzzy "valley of death," ambitious, focused technology work. That’s what we are trying to build at Speculative Technologies. My story is one of moving from one institution to another, being constantly dissatisfied, and finally realizing I needed to imagine and build new ones.

Speculative Technologies

David Hilmer Rex
What is Speculative Technologies, and what are some examples of existing and upcoming projects?

Ben Reinhardt
Speculative Technologies is a nonprofit industrial research lab. We're focused on building new technologies and making sure they are actually useful.

One program we have is working on protein-based fibers. Everybody knows spider silk is an amazing material — we can make the proteins for it, but turning those proteins into a fiber at a scale and a price that people would be willing to pay is something we can't yet do. Beyond spider silk, we could create fibers with all sorts of properties, from replacing microplastics to developing extremely strong or soft materials. So we're working on the technology to design and create better protein-based fibers.

We also have a program focused on new ways of making microelectronics — completely rethinking how we make microelectronics from the ground up.

In addition, we run an accelerator that helps people start ambitious research programs, whether inside Speculative Technologies, a focused research organization, or even at one of the government ARPAs. So we both run programs and help people start programs, wherever they might land.

Materials and Manufacturing as Upstream of Systemic Problems

David Hilmer Rex
You write that materials and manufacturing are upstream of many problems we face today — climate change, biodiversity loss, and more. Can you unpack that idea?

Ben Reinhardt
Basically, every technology we use bottoms out at materials and manufacturing processes — how we turn materials into things.

Take climate change: carbon emissions are driven by industrial processes. If we create new processes that don't create those emissions, we can solve a big part of the problem. If we pull carbon out of the atmosphere, that is going to be through discovery of new materials and then we will need new processes to create those materials. For example, metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) could potentially help sequester carbon, but there are many other possibilities.

We’re not going to rewind the clock to the 18th century. The only way we can combat these problems — while maintaining and improving our standard of living — is by creating new materials and manufacturing processes. The second-order effects will both prevent us from creating more problems and hopefully help solve the ones we've already created.

The Real Limits of Universities

David Hilmer Rex
You’ve been thinking about research institutions for a long time — but what has working inside Speculative Technologies taught you about the real limits of universities? Has it changed your view, or mostly confirmed what you suspected?

Ben Reinhardt
It confirmed what I suspected — and made me realize the situation is even worse than I thought.

I imagined Speculative Technologies being a private ARPA, where we primarily work with existing institutions, particularly universities. But honestly, in working with universities, the constraints and the amount of friction has been so high, that I have shifted away from being optimistic about our ability to do that. We actually need to build completely parallel institutions.

So yes, it confirmed my bias — but being in the arena, doing the thing, you learn much more about the specific situation on the ground, not just the high-level systemic ones.

David Hilmer Rex
Has this changed how you imagine your programs — and your conversations with funders?

Ben Reinhardt
Absolutely. When we started, I imagined programs with a program manager working with multiple external organizations. Now, I think of programs much more like focused research organizations, or internal labs, where you work with external partners when it makes sense, but primarily, the work happens inside Speculative Technologies.

Systems Research and Speculation

David Hilmer Rex
Can you elaborate on your notion of imagination and speculation — and the role of systems research?

Ben Reinhardt
Let me start with Systems Research, which is this idea that to actually build useful technology, it needs to be a system. Take an electric car: it’s not just a battery or a motor — it’s the battery, the motor, the control algorithms, all working together. Even the battery itself is a system: cathode, anode, control loop.

A lot of our research system incentivizes working on isolated components, with the hope that someone else will come along and stitch them together. But building the system itself — integrating components, adjusting them, making the whole thing work — is research too. It requires iteration, adjustment, not just assembly. Systems research is critical, but it's not prioritized enough.

In terms of imagination and speculation; with all research, there's this very tricky line that needs to be walked, where, on the one hand, you need to have openness and curiosity and ask; What if this worked? What would that take? At the same time you need this pragmatism; What work do we actually need to do? What are the physical limits? Simultaneously you need to be ambitious and speculative and have a lot of imagination, while at the same time, be in touch with reality. And I feel like the majority of people and organizations fall short one way or another. Either they are head in the clouds or they are too focused on incremental improvements. Walking right between those two is extremely hard and extremely valuable.

Unbundling the University

David Hilmer Rex
Let's explore your recent piece, Unbundling the University. Let me try to briefly summarize what I took from it:

Universities need to make space around themselves by refocusing on their core strengths: education, scholarship, and basic research. They should loosen their grip on infrastructure, lab space, and IP.

In parallel, we need a modular research ecosystem, made up of institutions intentionally designed for different kinds of work — FROs, CRPs, DARPA- or BBN-style programs, and others yet to be invented — enabled by shared standards for collaboration and coordination.

Funders need to shift from short-term project support toward enabling a broader variety of organizations, with long-term, high-trust, outcome-driven funding.

Finally, we need to rethink what counts as success: move beyond academic affiliation and bibliometrics, and instead look at reusability, infrastructure creation, datasets, tools, protocols, milestone delivery, downstream uptake, and whether a project actually enables others to do important work.

Ben Reinhardt
I think the reason I didn’t provide a full roadmap is that my fundamental thesis is that it’s going to be an emergent, bottom-up sort of thing. The central thing I’m suggesting is that we need to make space for institutions and approaches that I myself can’t even imagine.

David Hilmer Rex
When preparing for this, I wondered — have you been contacted by anyone from universities who expressed interest in unbundling or doing things differently, either in response to that piece or through your work at Speculative Technologies?

Ben Reinhardt
I've never been contacted by anybody at the administrative level. I’ve talked to many professors who would like to see this happen, but I don’t think the push will come from inside. The people who run universities have strong incentives to maintain their monopolies. When you have a monopoly, it's nice to maintain it. Nobody at a university has ever said to me, “We should do less stuff.” Universities usually only end up doing less when forced by outside circumstances.

That connects to funders: a lot of funding today assumes — implicitly or explicitly — that it’s going to universities. Either it’s legally restricted, or it requires a principal investigator who already has a lab and graduate students. If you assume those things, you're assuming a university.

I’ve started talking to funders about shifting their assumptions — loosening restrictions so that funding can support other kinds of organizations. Even just leveling the playing field would be a great start. Explicitly funding non-university organizations would be even better.

David Hilmer Rex
In the programs you’re running, what are the arguments for still working with universities? Is it mainly about lab space, equipment, or people?

Ben Reinhardt
There’s the immediate, practical argument — and a more abstract one. Practically, universities are still where the labs are, where the researchers are, where the reputation and legitimacy are anchored. And as we just discussed, most funding is set up to flow through universities.

Abstractly, I think the core competency of universities will continue to be understanding the deep truths of the universe. They will likely always be a home for world-class scientists. But that doesn't mean they should be the home for all forms of research or technology development.

Metascience

David Hilmer Rex
To finish off, I'd like to hear your thoughts on the metascience movement over the past 10 years — where you’ve been a central figure.

Ben Reinhardt
The metascience movement is great. I like all the people in it. But I don't think we’ve succeeded yet. The movement is decentralized — made up of many people responding to different frustrations with the current system. There isn’t just one problem, and there isn’t just one solution. I do think we’re making progress. People are starting to take it seriously. You see government officials referencing the need for new institutions now — that wouldn’t have happened ten years ago. But I think we’re still at the bottom of the S-curve. Many of the things we’re agitating for haven’t really happened yet. And that’s okay — 10 years feels long in startup terms, but on institutional time scales, it’s nothing. Institutional change takes a long time.