# Hunting vs Farming Ideas Ideas are like food for institutions in the innovation business. Accordingly, there are roughly two ways that those institutions find new ideas: hunting and farming. Organizations that *hunt ideas* go out in the world assuming that someone external to the organization has come up with the idea. The organization’s moves are to further enable that person (usually through funding) or acquire the idea. “Finding talent”, grants, investing, and portfolios are all hunting strategies. Organizations that *farm ideas* try to create ideas internally. [[§Program Design]], research labs, ==need more things in this list== are all farming strategies. Hunting is a searching and filtering process. Farming is a creation process. Hunting is [[Indefinite optimism]] while farming is [[Definite optimism]]. If you don’t know how to create a good idea or what one looks like until it can justify itself, hunting is the correct strategy. Hunting ideas assumes that idea creation is a mystical process that cannot be systemized. Ideas spring up in the world and you need to go find them. Farming ideas assumes that idea creation can, to some extent, be systemized. The world’s pendulum feels like it has swung strongly towards hunting — many people see startups and venture capital as the way to advance our material technology. The swing towards hunting reflects broader trends towards “Index Mindsets” [[luttigIndexMindset2021]] and [[Indefinite optimism]]. There are a number of good reasons towards the swing: hunting has been incredibly successful (especially when the farming was the dominant approach; (perhaps breaking the analogy with food hunting) farming is inefficient because you need to internalize the costs of all the ideas that go nowhere; many of the farming organizations of the 20th century degraded to innovation stifling waterfall development and top-down control. Both hunting and farming can have both productive and unproductive forms. The two-sided nature of idea approaches is similar to [[Aristotle]]’s observation of how democracies can degrade into mobs and monarchies can descend into tyrannies. In its productive form, hunting lets bottom-up emergent order work its magic, discovering and amplifying ideas that nobody could have predicted from unexpected sources. Hunting degenerates to endless buck-passing, the death of ideas that can’t justify themselves to an external organization, and herd behavior as everybody uses everybody else as their heuristic for good ideas. In its productive form, farming keeps [[Safi Bahcall]]’s “warty babies”[^1] alive until they can justify themselves, it fosters ideas that require a higher level of coordination or planning, and enables an organization to hone a process of creating ideas over time. Farming degenerates to politics, pet projects, waste, rigid processes, and top-down control. Hunting ideas is efficient, but [[Efficiency biases systems towards false negatives]]. While the seas might be deep and idea fish might still be plentiful, at the end of the day hunting is an extractive and zero-sum process. Each idea that your organization grabs is one that another organization cannot (obviously this analogy is imperfect — multiple firms can fund a start up, but there is only so much room in a round). Hunting requires some external font of ideas to replenish the supply. Of course, hunting can be done in a sustainable manner and in some cases can actually benefit its targets (keeping deer populations from depleting their food supplies for animals and incentivizing people to act on their latent ambitions in the case of ideas). [[Research management matters]] ### Related * [[DARPA is a coordination mechanism]] * [[PARPA is a coordination mechanism]] * [[When is push or pull appropriate for innovation orgs?]] * [[Emergent systems can't be designed but they could be gardened]] * [[The knowledge frontier is a high-dimensional garden]] * [[luttigIndexMindset2021]] * [[Instead of planning not working as well as people in the past thought as a society we’ve become worse at technological planning]] * [[Research requires intrinsic motivation]] [^1]: See [[bahcallLoonshotsHowNurture2019]]