We tend to understand exceptional work through the individual who produces it. A discovery belongs to its scientist; a company belongs to its founders; a remarkable piece of engineering is explained through the ability and persistence of the person who built it. These accounts are useful, although they leave out an extraordinary amount of what made the work possible in the first place: who taught that person, what they were exposed to, which ambitions seemed reasonable to them, and whether anyone was around to help when the work became difficult.
None of this diminishes the importance of individual ability. It suggests that ability is only part of the story, and that the distribution of consequential work might look very different if the conditions under which people develop and exercise that ability were less uneven.
The distance between ability and invention.
In a study linking tax records to more than a million American inventors, Alexander Bell and his coauthors found that children raised in families in the top one percent of the income distribution were ten times as likely to become patent inventors as children from below-median-income families. The difference persisted, to a substantial extent, among children with comparable mathematics scores early in life, a result that raises a difficult question about how much inventive potential fails to become visible.1
What makes the research particularly relevant is its account of exposure. Children who grew up around inventors were more likely to invent themselves, including within the particular technological fields they had encountered. The authors find evidence consistent with a causal role for exposure, suggesting that the people and kinds of work within someone's reach can influence what they eventually produce.1
The study measures patenting, which is only one kind of innovation, and cannot tell us how many exceptional ideas would emerge under a different arrangement of opportunities. It does, however, give us a reason to take the environment surrounding talented people as seriously as the talent itself.
By family income, relative to children from below-median-income households.
What a person considers possible can change.
Before someone seriously pursues a line of work, they must know enough about it to imagine themselves participating. That knowledge is acquired from teachers, family, media, the surrounding community, and occasionally a single person whose example makes an unfamiliar future suddenly seem less distant.
Across five decades of studies that asked children to draw a scientist, researchers documented how strongly those mental pictures can change. In the original study, conducted from 1966 to 1977, 0.6 percent of children depicted a female scientist; in later studies conducted between 1985 and 2016, the average was 28 percent. The samples are different, and a drawing is not a statement of what a child intends to become, but the change illustrates that even an apparently settled idea about who belongs in a field is learned rather than permanent.2
A field experiment in French high schools offers a more direct account of what exposure can do: brief visits from women working in science altered students' perceptions of scientific careers and increased enrollment in selective, male-dominated STEM programs among high-achieving girls in their final year of school. It would be too strong to generalize that result to every subject or every visitor, yet it supports the possibility that an encounter with someone doing the work can change the decisions people make about their own.3
Share of drawings depicting a female scientist in separate sets of studies.
Teaching has consequences well beyond the classroom.
The effects of good instruction can be difficult to see in the moment. Someone walks away from a class with a new understanding, but the more consequential change might be what they decide to study next, the technical problem they are suddenly equipped to approach, or the confidence they acquire to question an assumption they previously accepted.
Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff examined school and tax records for more than a million children and found that assignment to teachers with higher measured value-added was associated with improved outcomes years later, including college attendance and earnings. Their estimate that replacing a teacher in the bottom five percent with an average teacher would increase the present value of a classroom's students' lifetime earnings by approximately $250,000 is specific to the study's setting and assumptions; it is not a forecast for an Institute lecture.4
Still, the implication is difficult to ignore. If the quality of instruction can continue affecting lives long after a classroom has emptied, then making exceptional teaching accessible, recording it carefully, and allowing people to return to it may have a value that a single live event cannot capture.
Study-based estimate for replacing one bottom-five-percent value-added teacher with an average teacher.
Estimated aggregate increase in the present value of students' lifetime earnings per classroom.
Proximity creates an opening. Relationships require more.
Knowing the right people is often described as a matter of luck, as though some individuals happen to meet mentors, collaborators, customers, and investors while others do not. Yet the environments people enter, and the social arrangements within them, influence whose paths intersect and whether those encounters develop into relationships.
In a study of social networks and economic mobility, Raj Chetty and collaborators found that friendships across socioeconomic lines were especially strongly associated with upward income mobility. A companion analysis suggested that approximately half of the gap in cross-class connectedness between socioeconomic groups reflected differences in who people were exposed to, while the other half reflected differences in whether friendships formed even within shared settings.5, 6
The distinction is important for an institution organized around gathering people. It is possible to place a talented student and a successful founder in the same auditorium and have neither influence the other's life. A useful gathering asks more of its design: repeated contact, substantive discussion, shared work, and circumstances in which the value of a person is not inferred only from their title or ability to pay for admission.
Approximate decomposition of the gap between low- and high-SES individuals in the share of friends with high SES.
Where someone grows up is part of the equation.
The opportunity to develop one's abilities is also geographical. An unusually ambitious child can be surrounded by people who care deeply about their future and still be far from a laboratory, an exceptional teacher in a particular discipline, a community of builders, or the capital needed to take a difficult idea beyond its first version.
In the Opportunity Atlas, Chetty and coauthors examined how outcomes in adulthood vary across American neighborhoods. Their 2026 study estimated that 60 percent of the variation in these outcomes across neighborhoods reflected causal effects of place, using experimental and quasi-experimental evidence. This concerns economic outcomes and childhood environments, not the likelihood that someone will start a company or make a scientific discovery, but it is strong evidence that the environment in which people develop can matter enormously.7
We are interested in how an institution might make some of the advantages associated with particular places less dependent on having grown up there. The capacity to watch a great lecture from anywhere is one beginning; the harder work is extending access to people, collaboration, practical facilities, and resources that remain difficult to distribute.
Estimated share of the variation in childhood-neighborhood outcomes attributable to causal effects of neighborhoods.
What should we build in response?
These findings come from different fields, answer different questions, and describe outcomes that cannot simply be collapsed into a single measure of human potential. Taken together, however, they suggest a proposition worth examining: the accomplishments we attribute to exceptional individuals depend partly on social and institutional conditions that could be designed more deliberately and made accessible more widely.
Innovation Institute is being established around that proposition. We want to bring the best teachers and practitioners into sustained contact with people who are serious about learning and making things; to produce lectures that are rigorous enough to study rather than merely inspiring enough to share; and to make that teaching freely available, live and afterward, so that the usefulness of an encounter is not bounded by who could afford to be in the room.
We also want to bring people together physically, across disciplines and stages of their lives, because some forms of learning emerge through argument, friendship, shared attention, and working on something with someone whose perspective you would not otherwise have encountered. Great conferences, small seminars, practical workshops, and a community that remains active between them can each contribute something different. Their purpose is to create encounters that continue to matter once everyone has gone home.
For promising work, knowledge and relationships may eventually prove insufficient without money, equipment, technical assistance, or an early person willing to take the project seriously. As the institution develops, we intend to find ways to supply those resources, including investments in people and companies whose work merits support. The commercial activities that help finance the Institute should make its public educational work more durable, while the selection of people and projects must remain independent of who purchases admission or sponsorship.
We cannot responsibly claim that the Institute will change someone's trajectory before we have begun to measure its effects. The questions are therefore part of the work: who is able to participate, what they come to understand, whom they meet, what they attempt afterward, and whether those attempts would have happened in the same form without us. We hope, in time, to learn from those answers and build a better institution because of them.
There is an immense amount of work left to be done in the world, and there are certainly people capable of doing it whom we have yet to recognize. We are building Innovation Institute for the possibility that, by changing the conditions surrounding those people, more of that work might actually begin.
Research
- Bell, A., Chetty, R., Jaravel, X., Petkova, N., & Van Reenen, J. (2019). Who Becomes an Inventor in America? The Importance of Exposure to Innovation. NBER Working Paper 24062.
- Miller, D. I., Nolla, K. M., Eagly, A. H., & Uttal, D. H. (2018). The Development of Children's Gender-Science Stereotypes: A Meta-analysis of 5 Decades of U.S. Draw-A-Scientist Studies. Child Development.
- Van Effenterre, C. (2023). How Effective are Female Role Models in Steering Girls Towards STEM? Evidence from French High Schools. The Economic Journal.
- Chetty, R., Friedman, J. N., & Rockoff, J. E. (2014). Measuring the Impacts of Teachers II: Teacher Value-Added and Student Outcomes in Adulthood. American Economic Review.
- Chetty, R., Friedman, J. N., Hendren, N., Jones, M. R., & Porter, S. R. (2026). The Opportunity Atlas: Mapping the Childhood Roots of Social Mobility. American Economic Review.