Harnessing butterflies for creating innovation tornadoes

The purpose of this paper is to offer a “Gedankenexperiment” related to the question of amplification of innovation. We assume a simple innovation ecosystem in which its different actors (research communities, industry and public and private investors) interact in parallel but pursue different (but not necessarily incompatible) goals. Our approach is inspired by chaos and non-linear dynamical system theories and the famous “butterfly effect”. An arm-chair recipe on how to amplify innovation is casually offered and some concrete examples are outlined.