About CIGS

The Center for Innovation Growth and Society was co-founded by Pia Malaney and INET in response to the need for new economic thinking stemming from Deep Technology. The Center defines DeepTech to mean technology whose effects on the lives of individuals or civil society at large is profound enough to potentially re-write the rules of work, life, commerce or democracy.

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The Center for Innovation, Growth and Society: Innovating economics for Innovation

Innovation changes what gets done in traditional markets. Deep innovation changes the very structure and rules of the markets themselves.

In recognition that powerful technology from Crypto to Deep Learning is now unexpectedly rewriting the very rules of markets, INET has launched the Center for Innovation, Growth and Society.  Our mission at the INET Center is to organically co-develop the understanding of the economics of deep innovation alongside the innovations and innovators themselves, as well as to work toward integrating this technology into the economy in socially constructive ways. The Center will work with INET’s unique international network of academics and policy contacts and act as a trusted translator and convener to increase alignment between the policy, finance, labor and technology communities on topics such as regulation, economic security, diversity, and government investment in STEM.

Founded in Silicon Valley in 2018, the Center endeavors to:

1. Locate the areas of profound innovation most likely to transform the very nature of markets.
2. Discover, catalyze and curate the brain trusts engaged in the leading thinking in these areas.
3. Promote the rigorous discussion and study of the new economic thinking needed to heighten awareness of the ramifications and possibilities of innovations.
4. Steer the understanding of these technologies so that we are able to shape the best future possible, rather than having technology choose it for us by default.

Where the core work of INET since its founding in 2009 has been to develop the needed new economic thinking around traditional markets, the Center is specifically focused on those areas where the nature of markets may be challenged and irrevocably changed by innovations. It complements INET’s core focus by bringing coherence to our understanding of these unprecedented developments that heretofore have had no economic framework applied to them and by developing new economic thinking in precisely the areas in which there may not be standard economic thinking to correct or improve.

The Center’s focus can be broadly divided into the following three categories:

• The new economics we need to understand deep innovation
• The new economics we need to guide our thinking on deep innovation in relation to civil society
• Policies that encourage and steer innovation so that it benefits society—and avoids inadvertent and unnecessary harm to human communities.

The Center’s convenings will bring together technology innovators, social innovators, academics, philanthropists and civic leaders to explore a series of issues driving the relationship between economics and innovation. The research agenda will be driven by INET’s vision of bringing new and rigorous approaches to understanding economics and its relationship to society.