Applied Emergence
Navigating Complexity.
Solving Real Problems.
Led by Phil Watson,
former Director of R&D at Google X
Our world is speeding up. We’re increasingly interconnected, and uncertainty about the future due to feedback loops and emergent behavior is all around us. The volume of information we must track and the nuance that might steer a system this way or that is increasingly beyond the scope of human intuition.
As Stephen Hawking predicted, this is the "century of complexity."
At Applied Emergence, we’re willing to dig deep into these weeds and look at the systems at play, parsing their underlying structure and causality. And when useful, we use mind-extending tools — including AI-enhanced simulations and network analysis — to pierce the fog and build actionable paths forward.
Grounding Perspective
Phil Watson combines a Ph.D. in Physics with 25 years of R&D and organizational leadership experience, including his tenure as a Director of R&D at Google X (The Moonshot Factory) where he led new project creation and was instrumental in shaping the lab's innovation culture. A builder and inventor with more than 50 issued US patents, he’s comfortable diving into technical and ecosystem-level challenges, organizational architecture debugging, and training — as well as a variety of other topics — with his extended team.
Founder / Director
How We Engage
Lab Notebook:
Proprietary research and interaction modeling
Exploring Selective Permeability of Content in Social Networks
Mapping Efficiency Frontiers
of Corporate Incentives
