This is a cross-post from my personal blog, https://jamieonsoftware.com/2022/08/27/state-adjacent-institutions.html.

It has a UK focus, but a similar model will almost certainly have applications beyond the UK.

From Dominic Cummings’s recent ‘Snippets 5’:

NSN searched for people who wanted to start new schools that we intended to allow under new legislation then worked with them on their application.
It developed specific ideas for how the system should work. Unlike normal think tanks, it worked at the extreme detail end of the spectrum, like drafting actual forms that the DfE could use.
We thought that if we helped people develop specific projects and could actually bend the bureaucracy, we could get ‘Free Schools’ going.

This is interesting, because it suggests a model for state-adjacent institutions that support the functions of the state without being tied to the bureaucracy or subject to the incentives. Something somewhere in the midpoint between a management consultancy, a think tank, and a training institute.

It seems like this sort of model is beneficial in specific circumstances:

Where there is considerable state funding for a certain industry / project / goal, where ‘considerable’ is relative to the industry / project / goal. (You need more money to make a new nuclear power plant design than you do a school.)
Where access to that funding is reasonably competitive. This means it needs to be accessible to SMEs or small teams, rather than just Serco, G4S, the major universities, and the other big boys.
Where the government department distributing the funding is receptive to introductions, advice, support. A lot of the benefits seem to come from new ideas being introduced revisited through a feedback loop, so the department must be flexible enough to integrate the state-adjacent institution into its decision making – or, at least, leave its door open to such input. Generally, I suspect, departments are only really flexible in this sort of way during their first few years and for a year or two after a major shake-up (eg DoE under Gove).

A few ideas where this could be useful:

An ‘ARIA Attractor’: finding individuals / teams with audacious projects, helping them refine their proposals, and using the knowledge gained from the search to help shape the department’s broader research focus.
An analogous attractor for the UKRI / NIH / other ‘normal science’ funding b

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