Let’s look at one of the fastest-growing companies in the world today: Anthropic, the AI company behind Claude. Scan down its team page and something might jump out: one of its founders, Jared Kaplan, a theoretical physicist at Johns Hopkins, is badged as chief science officer (CSO).
This is the latest example of a business putting cutting-edge science at the centre of its strategy and decision-making. Anthropic’s success to date has been driven by more than having a CSO alone, of course. But if you are a large business and you’re not giving science the priority it deserves, you’re about to get caught out.
Where does the chief science officer fit in?
What does a chief science officer actually do? While the definition will vary depending on company and sector, they are responsible for driving scientific breakthroughs at the heart of the business.
That may mean managing teams of scientists internally or acting as a bridge between academia and the company. More often, though, it means both: tracking developments in the academic world, then commercialising that research inside the business.
This is more than simply coming up with new ideas. Major scientific advances require genuinely novel breakthroughs, whether that’s a new material, a different way of transmitting or encoding information or a more effective manufacturing process. These require hard science, which is exactly why the title chief innovation officer fails to capture the role.
The term chief innovation officer underplays the financial and intellectual investment required to produce a radical breakthrough. New ideas, however valuable, can emerge in the armchair. Scientific breakthroughs require labs, long R&D cycles, experimentation, and mathematical modelling.
Why is deep science so important?
This gets to the heart of why hard science matters so much to the modern corporation: although it is resource-intensive, the breakthroughs it produces are often proprietary and defensible.
Scientific research gives a business something that cannot easily be replicated. It is an antidote to recent software fad cycles, where start-ups wrap the same underlying technology in a fancier UI. Instead, it produces products that are genuinely differentiated in the market and thus potentially highly profitable.
It becomes the R&D engine of the company, creating new, defensible technologies that deepen its competitive moat while generating new income streams. This is why deep scientific breakthroughs tend to promise better long-term returns, with deep-tech investments generating an average net IRR of 17% compared with just 10% for traditional tech funds, according to McKinsey.
But deep science is also about defending your business against radical disruption. Faced with the rise of quantum computing, space-based technology, and energy transformation, corporations need to invest in R&D or risk being leapfrogged. However strong your brand is, if a new competitor can manufacture purer semiconductors in space faster than you can on the ground, you will be overtaken.
But why do you need a CSO?
So why do you need a board-level CSO at all? Why can all this not sit within the existing corporate hierarchy, reporting up to the COO or CTO?
First, if the argument above is right, then a very large share of your revenues in 10 years’ time may come from products that do not yet exist. Given the impact this could have on a company’s financial performance and its long-term viability, the discussion needs to happen at board level.
These breakthroughs will also shape the entire strategy of the business: who it hires, where it allocates capital, how it operates, and what it builds for the future. This kind of leadership needs to come from the very top of the organisation, so it can feed into important decisions across the organisation.
Second, this is not a responsibility that can easily be bolted on to another executive role. It requires deep scientific understanding. The world is full of faddish, popular, and often cranky science. It is the CSO’s job to distinguish the breakthroughs that are genuinely going to change the commercial landscape from those that will fade away. That calls for deep familiarity with the underlying science. Otherwise, you may have spent the last 40 years shovelling money into cold fusion or the last 10 into blockchain databases.
At the same time, and perhaps most importantly, managing groups of highly intelligent scientists is a distinctive skill. Scientists are often motivated less by the bottom line or corporate progression than by intellectual problem-solving and theoretical exploration. They often react poorly to rigid corporate structures and feel alienated by the language and priorities of most CXOs.
The statistics bear this out. A recent survey in biotech, for example, found that 60% of R&D professionals were thinking about leaving their jobs, with one third citing “uninspiring” leadership as a key reason.
The CSO, then, brings a distinctive skillset: speaking the language of scientists, motivating them in ways that are likely to come unnaturally to most managers, and acting as a bridge, or even a shield, between them and the rest of the business.
Taken together, science is the best way to drive sustainable growth at your business, and it needs its own dedicated board-level champion. To put it another way: if corporations want to follow in the footsteps of high-growth companies such as Anthropic, they need to learn the right lessons. Appointing a CSO and giving them real authority is the best first step.
Dr Ewan Kirk is founder of Cantab Capital Partners, former chair of the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences and non-executive director of BAE Systems.
Let’s look at one of the fastest-growing companies in the world today: Anthropic, the AI company behind Claude. Scan down its team page and something might jump out: one of its founders, Jared Kaplan, a theoretical physicist at Johns Hopkins, is badged as chief science officer (CSO).
This is the latest example of a business putting cutting-edge science at the centre of its strategy and decision-making. Anthropic's success to date has been driven by more than having a CSO alone, of course. But if you are a large business and you’re not giving science the priority it deserves, you're about to get caught out.
