Deviant innovation territories in Mexico

The Geopolitics of Clandestine Innovation in the drug business.

A framework of analysis to understand adaptation capacities of TCOs

I just published a new chapter in a White Paper published by the Joint Chiefs of Staff (Department of Defense). The title of the collection is: The “New” Face of Transnational Crime Organizations (TCOs): A Geopolitical Perspective and Implications to U.S. National Security.

The full publication can be found here.

The google scholar citation can be found here.

As the publication is completely open-source (kudos to DoD for that!), I can transcribe the full text in medium. Here it is.

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Transnational Criminal Organizations (TCOs) operate as fully developed platforms for innovation that compete violently with each other to provide to deviant entrepreneurs some of the key advantages of what Michael Porter calls “business clusters.” A porterian cluster is defined as a “geographic concentration of interconnected businesses, suppliers, and associated institutions in a particular field that are present in a nation or region. Clusters arise because they increase the productivity with which companies can compete” (1998). Silicon Valley is probably the gold standard of Porterian clusters, and many governments around the planet have been trying to artificially create clusters as a central objective for urban planning and economic development.

In reality, the track record of managed urban planning policies to encourage innovation through clusters is controversial. For example, a recent study of innovation dynamics in Norway found that “firms that develop international partnerships are likely to innovate, firms that rely on national and local interaction are not, meaning that the transfer mechanisms of knowledge and innovation within close geographical proximity are either broken or less prominent than previously thought.” (Fijtar & Rodriguez-Pose, 2011 p:32). The study did find an important nexus between “global pipelines” and radical innovation, that is “purpose-built connections between a given local firm and partners in the outside world. Partners can range from other firms, suppliers or clients, to universities or research centres.” ( Fijtar & Rodriguez-Pose, 2011 p:8). From the results of this study, Vivek Wadhwa, one of the biggest innovation “gurus” of Silicon Valley goes as far as labeling regional cluster policies as “modern day snake oil” because they obsess over the wrong thing. Wadhwa provides what he calls a “formula for nurturing growth”:

“We need to remove the obstacles to entrepreneurship — such as knowledge of how to start companies, fear of failure, lack of mentors and networks, government regulations and financing. And we need to repair our university research commercialization system so that research breakthroughs translate into invention. That’s the correct formula for nurturing regional growth.” (2011)

At the center of this controversy is a geopolitical question: What is the relation between territory, global pipelines (or networks) formed by human capital and radical innovation? The question is relevant for the innovation dynamics of TCOs, as they are surrounded by a singular innovation environment that combines the organic and unpredictable emergence of deviant porterian clusters, with the innovation nurturing formula that Vivek Wadhawa deems central to effective entrepreneurship, and a dark pipeline that promotes knowledge-transfer to propagate successful deviant innovations throughout the network.

A.- The emergence of deviant innovation clusters in the Mexican geography

The geopolitics of the criminal drug business in Mexico are defined by an evident hegemonic dominance of Sinaloans. The state of Sinaloa provided to drug smugglers with “the needed geographic and climatic conditions, good infrastructure, the required know-how from certain chinese immigrants who knew how to cultivate and prepare opium, an entrepreneurial ethos, and probably better protection by the police…” (Astorga, 2004).

That is, Sinaloa, particularly the region surrounding the municipality of Badiraguato, provided the cluster of interconnected organizations, suppliers and institutions to innovate and produce the sustainable smuggling market that TCOs run today. While the first recognizable cartel in Mexico received the name of the cartel of Guadalajara because its headquarters were located in the capital of the state of Jalisco as a consequence of law enforcement operations, it was founded by the Sinaloan Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo and run by Sinaloans who never lost their geopolitical relation with the Sinaloan territory.

When Felix Gallardo decided to split the cartel of Guadalajara, the division of this “parent cartel” triggered the formation of four spin-offs: the cartels of Tijuana, Juarez, Golfo and Sinaloa. These new organizations were meant to create a collaborative business environment by distributing peacefully key smuggling routes among important criminal stakeholders. As we know today, the peace would not last.

This original group of deviant entrepreneurs migrated to other territories, taking with them key components of the cluster. A good way of thinking about it would be to imagine what would happen if an external eventuality (probably a big earthquake!) forced the entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley to fragment and move out of the Bay Area, bringing with them the intellectual property, the companies, the business connections and financial capacities to new territories.

Sinaloa provided the conditions of a successful business cluster from where the Mexican drug cartels evolved into the highly complex criminal business operations they are today. The decision to split the original monopoly that had emerged from that cluster into four different geographic regions distributed not only the routes for drug smuggling, but also the innovation capacities of deviant entrepreneurs and encouraged a fierce competition among the four new organizations, producing the exact opposite effect of the “peaceful” objectives of the division. This expansion and fragmentation has continued beyond those original territories, and as a consequence the Mexican territory is today covered with many competitive deviant clusters (with different levels of success), where some or all the required conditions to become a clandestine innovator are collocated, or at least easily accessible.

Without a central planning authority managing cluster formation, TCOs that operate in the Mexico innovate and compete to survive, remaining profitable in the context of a deadly, non regulated and highly competitive environment. They create simple and cost-effective responses to public policies and consistently penetrate the centrally planned security deployments of the governments of Mexico and the United States.

At the same time, pipelines of criminal businesses, service providers, institutions and protection are all available in many territories for the deviant innovator who may want to enter the high risk/high reward world of TCOs, where information flows and innovation is replicated throughout the system.

B.- Deviant pipelines: learning from others to do right the wrong thing

As I mentioned before, TCOs benefit from both sides of the geopolitical controversy vis-a-vis the relation of territory and innovation. On the one hand, as we have seen, enough clusters have emerged in the Mexican geography to scaffold the innovation process of deviant organizations with a complex network of clandestine institutions that make them sustainable. What this means is that deviant innovators have geographic spaces from where it is possible to start and grow profitable transnational criminal organizations. While there are multiple spaces in the planet that can serve as safe havens for clandestine non-state actors, not many of them have the right elements to serve as an innovation platform to create criminal startups and grow them to become a link in the chain of multibillion-dollar global operations.

On the other hand, the competitive environment in which TCOs operate has already removed the previously mentioned individual obstacles to entrepreneurship that Vivek Wadhwa identified (2011), encouraging the formation of deviant pipelines that distribute knowledge at multiple geopolitical scales (local, regional and international) among the people that form clandestine networks:

1.- Knowledge about how to start deviant companies and mentoring. There is enough knowledge in the system to educate potential deviant innovators about how to start a smuggling company. The knowledge is reproduced through an effective mentoring and apprenticeship pipeline where individuals get to learn, “on the job,” how a specialized portion of the drug business operates, from other entrepreneurs.

2.- Fear of failure. The fear of failure takes a different meaning when the life and freedom of deviant entrepreneurs depends on the success of their operation. While a very special kind of risk management is at the center of the decision making process of TCOs, the organizations are naturally formed by people who have a high-risk tolerance.

3.- Government regulations. The business environment of the TCOs is mostly unconstrained by governmental regulation. Supply and demand of the criminal products or services dictate the price; the product is sold tax free and no authority controls workplace safety, workers rights, product quality, or managerial practices, including financing and subcontracting. The only exception to this is money-laundering activities, as they are designed precisely to move drug profits from this unregulated space to the legitimate and regulated economy.

Interdictions and tactical deployments do impact the business environment of TCOs, but not in their role of a legal regime, but as the definition of the problem that creates a market. Finding creative ways to break legal regimes is a key task of the TCO business model. For example, the interdiction to buy and sell cocaine creates the supply “problem” TCOs then solve. Likewise, a new technology deployed in the borderlands sends an innovation signal to deviant innovators to develop a smuggling countermeasure. Therefore, governmental action does not play the role of a regulatory regime, but of a problem for which an innovative solution creates a market.

4.- Breakthroughs to invention. Finally, there is enough clandestine seed and venture capital in the system to fund deviant entrepreneurs of all sizes, from small Research and Development (R&D) projects to create prototypes of new smuggling technologies, to the expensive private enforcement armies that fight to keep open the supply and distribution chains.

The result is a strategic environment where disruptive ideas rapidly become products or processes that are tested in the real world very fast, and success is easily imitated and iteratively improved. The path from clandestine innovation to deviant entrepreneurship is very short thanks to the removal of these four obstacles freeing the flow of information through this unobstructed pipeline.

Most of this deviant innovation activities are directed to accomplish one specific task: to illicitly appropriate (Calvillo & Nieto-Gomez, 2010) the technological backbone of globalization and penetrate the tactical technologies deployed by the governments of nation-states, in order to perform what Gilman calls the “ultimate arbitrage activity, growing at the intersection of ethical difference and regulatory inefficiency.” (2011, P: 3). That is, the product that for-profit TCOs commercialize is the arbitrage of a geopolitical spread between a morality based legislation and human desire, by innovating solutions to the challenges posed by technology based interdictions.

C.- Hacking interdictions: A high risk/high reward innovative business.

As the constant supply of illegal drugs into the United States has demonstrated over the last 20 years, TCOs are innovation patterns in time. These networks manage complexity and environmental change with success through a constant innovation process that iteratively solves the challenge of “hacking” governmental technologies, institutions and deployments.

Walled fortifications and new surveillance, interdiction and detection technologies have provoked an innovation/response cycle by the clandestine actors who are fighting to penetrate them. Each technology deployed in the borderlands or the interior of the national territories of the US and Mexico, for example, sends a stigmergic signal to deviant entrepreneurs to improve their capacities and innovate a countermeasure to respond to the new shape of the system.

Stigmergy “captures the notion that an agent’s actions leave signs in the environment, signs that other agents sense and that determine their subsequent actions.” (Parunak, 2005 p:2) In situations with a stigmergic architecture, like the geopolitics of clandestine innovation, the agents in a system perceive the state of the environment and from that stimulus, they make their choices that transform that state, leaving in the process new signals for other agents to interpret, in an iterative process.

Human Stigmergy

This stimulus/response cycle is at the center of the development of innovation of technologies used by TCOs to hack governmental interdictions. As Ted Lewis explains, stigmergy is “the product of individuals who work independently but are stimulated by the work they and others do… invention stimulates innovation, which leads to more invention, and so forth, in a never ending cycle” (2011).

In the previous flow chart, a border technology developer and the deviant innovator that hacks that technology never interact directly with each other. Nevertheless, through the signals that each of them encode in geopolitical environments as part of their decision making process, they stigmergically influence each other’s actions.

Through stigmergy, a social dynamic that we do not fully understand emerges around the clandestine pipelines to solve in an iterative process one well defined problem: Identify and exploit the vulnerabilities of a complicated but predictable enforcement architecture, building resilience to the clandestine supply chains as a consequence of these patterns. These social behaviors emerge because of the systemic forces that shape the environment in many counterintuitive ways, following a set of geopolitical rules that condition the risks and rewards for all the involved agents.

As the narcotics ethnographer Howard Campbell puts it, for deviant innovators, “the issue is avoidance trickery, evasion and “slantwise behavior”, that is actions that are undertaken by actors in order to achieve their own ends and that … frustrate state interests… Simultaneously, for the narcotics agents it is an endless intelligence game: decoding the signs, symbols, and movements of … nameless traffickers.” (2009, p: 12). The behavior Campbell describes is exactly the same kind of behavior of most computing hackers that learn how to impose their will to a system designed to perform a different task (Norton, N.A.). On the other hand, those signs and symbols Campbell talks about are precisely the stigmergic stimuli that trigger the iterative responses of all the actors involved in this web of maneuvers and counter-maneuvers.

Many of the failures in the current strategies to confront the threat of TCOs can be attributed to an important lack of systemic understanding of the innovation dynamics these policies affect but do not comprehend. Stigmergy has produced a social environment in which criminal clusters in these deviant networks respond iteratively to very aggressive but fairly predictable sustaining innovations pushed into the system by state actors. As a consequence of this process, the global pipelines operating in the intersection between legal interdiction and human desire have continued to improve their innovation capacities.

Innovators see in the problems of today the big markets of tomorrow. For deviant innovators, solving the scarcity “problems” that interdictions provoke as certain products or services become illegal is akin to an innovation grand challenge that stimulates TCOs’ creative behaviors in such a way that they base a big part of their business model in solving those geopolitical challenges. Innovators see in the problems of today the big markets of tomorrow. For deviant innovators, solving the scarcity “problems” that interdictions provoke as certain products or services become illegal is akin to an innovation grand challenge that stimulates TCOs’ creative behaviors in such a way that they base a big part of their business model in solving those geopolitical challenges.

For example, the drug smuggling innovation challenge has very clear rules:

The participating “teams” must optimize the transport of a series of interdicted chemical products to minimize risk, from a territory where they are cultivated and/or manufactured but have little market value, to another one where they are highly appreciated by a consumer market, avoiding the deadly predatory opposition of law enforcement agents, military and other adversarial forces (I.e. multiple competing TCOs).

The “purse” for those who succeed is high. According to DEA estimates cited by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the average street value of a gram of pure cocaine in 2009 in the US was $176 dollars (UNODC, 2009 P: 87), that is $17,600 per kilo. One suitcase with 25 kilos (a normal allowance for international flights) of pure cocaine is worth $440,000.

The profitability of smuggling activities is dependent on the solidity of the interdiction to maintain that business model. An effective border fortification increases the incentives to penetrate it because the interdiction sustains the artificial scarcity of the smuggled product. The more the governmental response is effective, the more TCOs receive stigmergic stimuli to break it.

Punishment mechanisms are also well integrated into the geopolitical environment of TCOs. A deviant innovator using ineffective smuggling technologies or processes will rapidly be captured or killed. The effectiveness of deviant innovations is thus easy to evaluate. Continuing with the cocaine example, deviant entrepreneurs who do not manage risk in an effective way to transport those chemical products from where they are abundant to where they are desired, provoke the arrest or death of the smuggling agent, removing the technique (and sometimes also the innovator) from the clandestine pipeline. That is, failed programs do not survive for too long in the way they do it in governmental environments where rewards and punishments follow a set of different rules.

Deviant innovators have one essential business requirement: to be one step ahead of the governmental deployment of interdiction technologies to remain a profitable operation that satisfies an artificially scarce human desire, while being ready to hack new inventions as soon as they are deployed. This hacking behavior can be observed in multiple contexts where deviant technologies are developed. For example, a deviant innovator who finds a method to counter the Digital Management Rights of the Xbox 360 can sell pirated video games, while another one who finds a way of manufacturing the newest leather pattern in vogue with enough fidelity to satisfy the consumer, can make and sell counterfeit Louis Vuitton handbags.

Of course, the most profitable and more critical of all the hacking behaviors of TCOs is to hack the tactical infrastructures and systems deployed at and around international points of entry to create and sustain profitable international smuggling routes. Hacking borders can be accomplished through multiple kinds of innovations, but the most common ones are: concealment technologies (E.g. modified cars or drugs in breast implants), smuggling in between points of entries (E.g. narco tunnels, ultra light aircrafts or catapults and pneumatic guns) or corruption schemes and other forms of social engineering (E.g. corrupt Border Patrol agents or American mayors or Mexican politicians, military or law enforcement).

Once a deviant technology is proven by a deviant innovator, others deviant entrepreneurs will adopt what innovation literature calls an “early followers” approach. Because there are no patents or property rights limiting the use of clandestine technologies, successful hacks rapidly propagate throughout the system until, at one point, governmental technologies close the gap, “patching” the vulnerability and outdating the deviant technology. However, normally by the time that governmental technologies have closed a particular exploit, deviant innovators have already been thinking about potential alternatives, and testing new methods for when the previous ones become legacy technology.

They do that not through a centrally planned strategy, but thanks to human stigmergy. Because of this, no agent has to be responsible of the whole “project” to keep the TCOs routes innovative, or know exactly about each governmental decision. Instead, the mechanisms of self-organization partially depend on the changes and signals encoded in the security landscapes and environments (geopolitical and social) of the borderlands. From indirect stimulus, clandestine agents innovate to survive.

Clandestine innovators who can make sense of this complex environment are constantly rewarded by the big profit margins of the drug business, while those who do not know how to exploit stigmergic information and innovate in a sustainable way, fail. Therefore, innovation is the key behavior that provides geopolitical resilience to TCOs, because the raw materials and resources TCOs use are easily replaceable before crossing the border. As the majority of the added value of drugs comes from their geographic location, innovation capacities are more important than other costs.

The borders of North America are the gateways that interconnect the American economy with the rest of the planet and represent big business opportunities that transnational corporations have exploited for the benefit of the US economy. Because of globalization, the US/Mexico border is the busiest border in the world, and production and supply chains have developed multiple interdependencies between the two countries. But the same innovation tools that have increased global commerce are available to deviant entrepreneurs as well. Current conditions in the international environment encourage the illicit appropriation of those same technologies by clandestine actors who innovate using those tools to research and develop immigration technologies to hack interdictions, and this includes the emergence of deviant porterian clusters and global knowledge pipelines, as previously described.

For example, thanks to that environment, a Mexican citizen can “pitch” an idea (an invention) to the right deviant Venture Capitalists (VCs) to improve the nature of submersibles to smuggle drugs from South America to Mexico. These VCs will be represented by a third party, so the entrepreneur is never in close contact with the person funding his research, and actually knows very little about the leadership structure of the TCO that is providing this first round of funding. With some “luck,” he will obtain the necessary money to do tests and build prototypes (the process can even receive a project name, “project Neptune”) creating something akin to a deviant startup company. A FARC controlled territory in Colombia can then provide the porterian cluster where the deviant innovator finds subcontractors with the required mechanical and engineering skills to build the prototype, labor is cheap, offices as well as test labs are available and therefore the deviant startup can be incubated to produce an innovation that ultimately will be successfully adopted by contractors smuggling drugs for TCOs.

This is the story of Miguel Angel Montoya, one of the few documented cases in which a deviant entrepreneur has provided a detailed recount of how he mounted a deviant startup to build a new kind of fully submersibles for a TCO (Montoya, 2007). His experience is very similar to that of thousands of innovators that are attracted to clusters like Silicon Valley to take advantage of the geographic concentration of the necessary building blocks to build a new technology company. The only difference (a big one) is that the problem he wanted to solve was not how to upload photos to Facebook more easily or how to build tablet computers, but instead how to make narco submersibles undetectable from the vantage point of an Coast Guard or Navy helicopter.

While we have little information about the management of other innovation projects, we do know that this subcontracting model based on human stigmergy has played an important role in the emergence of many other smuggling and concealment technologies. For example, deviant innovations like ramps to climb security walls, catapults or pneumatic guns to shoot drugs across the border or the development of construction techniques to dig narco tunnels, are all projects that emerged as a stigmergic response to environmental stimuli, conducted by deviant subcontractors who thought that they could solve the problem. What we do not know is how that model operates, how much VC money is spent to develop innovations, the key actors in the innovation clusters or how the networks of the global pipelines are really structured.

Understanding the forces behind the geopolitics of deviant innovation is essential to produce more effective strategies to counter the innovative capacities of TCOs. It is clear, for example, that the dominant idea of a centrally planned mafia coordinating every response to the deployment of governmental technologies is the wrong sensemaking model to understand the adaptation capacities of these clandestine organizations.

Instead, the complex system in which TCOs operate is more similar to the clusters and pipelines that fuel innovation of legitimate globalization, because deviant globalization uses the same tools. A lack of understanding of this funding and contracting and subcontracting model, for example,

“creates misimpressions about the effectiveness of the law‐enforcement response to smugglers. When a U.S. official holds a news conference proudly proclaiming the investigation of a “cartel” smuggling operation, the identification and arrest of the principals, and seizure of their assets, what this really means is that a business which contracts with the cartels for part of their operations has been identified and disrupted. That should be applauded, but in context. The elimination of one contractor, however satisfying, is by no means a blow to the criminal effort. There are certain to be other contractors operating on parallel tracks at each stage of the smuggling operation. Contractors are easily replaced. At worst, the smugglers experience some dislocation and must perform damage control.” (Goddard, 2012 P: 7)

The geopolitics of clandestine innovation are defined by the way in which deviant innovators monetize territorial conflict through invention, creativity and the illicit appropriation of the same engines that propel legal globalization. The clandestine supply chains are constantly challenged by governmental interdiction, and changes in the security landscapes of North America produce the stimuli that fuel the stigmergic architecture of this deviant sociotechnical system. The main objective of security and defense policies to deal with the threat of TCOs should be to learn how to dismantle not a particular innovation or a particular subcontracting unit, but how to manage the wicked problem presented by the innovation capacities of TCOs. In order to do that, we should be able to back engineer their innovation and business models.

C.- Conclusion. Prepare for obsolescence

At the seventh floor of the headquarters of the SEDENA (the Mexican Department of Defense) lays the “Museo del Enervante” or Museum of Drugs. Its access is restricted to members of the Armed Forces or special guests of the SEDENA and it serves as a didactical space to train the military personnel who will be involved in the so-called “war on drugs.”

The collection of this museum is formed by two different kinds of objects. One the one hand, the museum displays an important number of what could be described as the artifacts of the “narco-kitsch” culture that scaffolds the identity of drug dealers: Golden revolvers and AK-47s with engraved Mexican revolutionaries, belt buckles with marijuana leaves and diamonds incrustations, customized cowboy boots and many other products like that. This shared culture plays an important role, reinforcing the identity of the members of the narco global pipelines and clusters (Fugate, 2012), not unlike the innovation culture that with its own artifacts and fashions permeates Silicon Valley.

On the other hand, the museum has an abundant collection of smuggling artifacts that have been confiscated during the multiple operations that the Mexican armed forces carry against TCOs, to be used to teach about smuggling techniques.

The visitor of the museum may be tempted to observe the collection as a set of oddities; the artifacts of a never ending struggle against TCOs, collected by the SEDENA as the spoils of the war on drugs. Like in a zoo, the objects in museums invite us to observe them decontextualized from their environment. Observing this collection like that would be a mistake.

In reality, those objects expose some of the innovation capacities of TCOs, as well as some of the most powerful memes in deviant innovation sociotechnical systems. The objects in the museum of drugs form sets of evolving technologies and trace the stigmergic adaptation capacities of deviant innovators that respond to governmental stimulus by developing new tools to hack the interdictions in the geopolitical territories of the drug market.

Many of those technologies are now legacy technologies; smuggling systems that cannot be used anymore as governments have adopted effective countermeasures. Nevertheless, the flow of drugs has not been interrupted by the obsolescence of those particular innovations, as many other technologies have taken their place.

Certain high tech companies are famous for outdating their own products before the competition does it. Some others resist change that challenges the status quo of past successes, creating the famous innovator’s dilemma where the same managerial decisions that produced success in the past, produce failure when environmental conditions change (Christensen, 1997).

Members of TCOs who fall victim of the innovator’s dilemma do not linger for too long in the sociotechnical system. This means that whenever a stigmergic signal is perceived by TCOs, they have to respond fast or they will be removed from the network. This encourages a very agile approach to innovation, where multiple deviant “subcontractors” test ideas at the same time to solve new configurations of problems. Some work, some fail, but in general this approach builds resilience to the clandestine chains as the good ideas are propagated by the innovation pipelines and clusters, and the unsuccessful subcontractors are captured or killed when their approach fails.

On the other hand, governmental actors are constrained to follow a very regulated innovation path where previous policies and technologies are rewarded by the political environment in the form of continuing funding, renewal of contracts or promotion of successful individuals, independently of the real performance of those approaches, and high risk ideas offer little reward to governmental entrepreneurs (Nieto-Gomez, 2011).

To counteract this harmful effect of the governmental architecture for innovation, a “contrarian technology perspective” (Vogel, 2013 P: 48) should be encouraged in threat assessment processes when developing technologies to affect the geopolitical environment of deviant innovation. White hat hacking or red teaming are good examples of this contrarian perspective. Governmental developers must be allowed to constantly play the role of TCOs, penetrating governmental technologies.

Also, governmental technologies would benefit from following the obsolescence path, understanding that any particular technology is not an end in itself that will “solve” the TCO problem, but just one more link in the innovation chain that will probably be penetrated at one point.

Furthermore, technology developers and stakeholders should have a good understanding of the systemic forces interacting in the environment, as quite often the counterintuitive effect of some of the governmental technologies is to improve TCOs capabilities by unleashing disruptive innovation forces.

For governmental interventions in the geopolitical environments of TCOs to be successful, they should be “pivot friendly.” That is, policies should be designed in a way that whenever the environment changes, the shape of the governmental response can change with it. This means that instead of thinking about one particular innovation that must be neutralized, it is important to think at the scale of big technology trends, devaluing the importance of any individual adaptation in any threat assessment.

Finally, designing for obsolescence means designing for innovation and penetration. Governmental strategies should not ask the question “will this particular response be hacked?” but instead, “what to do when this particular response is hacked?” In this way, decision makers can avoid the trap of concentrating too much in one particular strategy or technology program, and instead encourage a contrarian technology perspective that looks for the right points of intervention to limit the geopolitical availability of deviant innovation clusters, and also fragments the systemic effectiveness of the pipelines that provide the creative resilience to TCOs.

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