Neil Lawrence joins the CDEI advisory board
Neil Lawrence was appointed a member of the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation advisory board.
Mind the gap: connecting AI innovation to public value
28 July 2026
Mind the gap: connecting AI innovation to public value
28 July 2026
Neil Lawrence and Jessica Montgomery have published Mind the gap: connecting AI innovation to widespread public value in Science and Public Policy. The article builds on the argument of the Bennett Institute Annual Public Policy Lecture (December 2024), Mind the Gap: Bridging Innovation’s Supply and Demand in the AI Era.
Public dialogues have been consistent about what people want from AI: innovations that improve shared wellbeing and remain under democratic control. Much of the innovation system has moved on a different path, pulled by the attention economy. The paper treats that divergence as a structural feature, not a communications failure. Closing it, the authors argue, needs a different driver of the innovation cycle — an attention reinvestment cycle, in which efficiency gains return as time that frontline professionals can spend adapting and sharing tools that meet priority needs. Running that cycle at scale needs institutional capacities the present science–policy system has not yet built: dialogic, absorptive and distributive.
The article is a central paper of the group’s AI Adoption programme. It is available at doi:10.1093/scipol/scag070.
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