Future of Being Human an Arizona State University initiative

Risk innovation: risk as a threat to value

Last updated 2026-08-07 · Markdown version

Risk innovation is the operational core of Andrew Maynard’s risk program and one of the oldest load-bearing ideas beneath the Future of Being Human initiative: stop treating risk as a probability of harm to be computed, and start treating it as a threat to value — including the kinds of value no spreadsheet holds, from dignity and identity to deeply held beliefs and a way of life. At an inflection point where transformative AI and other transformative technologies reach into who we are and not just what we can do, the things most worth protecting are often precisely the ones conventional risk analysis cannot count. Risk innovation is his answer: a reframe stated in full by 2016, an institutional arc that built tools around it, and a two-page planner for bringing the uncountable into real decisions.

The argument

Conventional risk analysis estimates the probability of adverse consequences — through experimentation or modeling — and constrains action to keep those probabilities acceptably low. It works where harms are measurable: mortality, environmental damage, financial loss. Andrew’s claim, built on a career in risk science spanning aerosols, nanotechnology, and emerging technology governance (Scholarship), is that this machinery runs out of steam exactly where transformative technologies bite hardest. There is, as he put it in 2020, “more to risk than probabilities”: what type of harm is at stake, how large it is, and who bears it all shape real risk decisions — and much of what people cannot face losing is not easily quantifiable. His astrobiology examples (2020-07-30): loss of opportunity, of hope, of agency.

The core move is a reframe: treat risk as a threat to value — either existing value that a person, community, or organization wants to protect, or “future value that a company or organization aspires to create or grow” (2023-11-21). “Value” is deliberately capacious. It captures the conventional categories — human and environmental health, economic sustainability — and extends to well-being, deeply held beliefs, cultural or personal identity, professional standing, dignity, hope, security, a way of life (2016-01-11; 2020-07-30; 2024-08-25). The reframe extends probability-based analysis rather than replacing it: it pulls the unquantifiable-but-decisive into the same decision frame as the measurable.

The distinctive sub-move: value is not values. Values are what someone considers good or bad; value is the worth of something to someone — worth measured in time, money, health, security, dignity, or access to resources (2024-08-25). The distinction makes the framing agnostic to worldviews and ideologies — an organization defines value in its own terms — but it imposes a reciprocal discipline: thinking through how its actions threaten what is of value to others — stakeholders, communities, society broadly — and thereby create avoidable risks to its own enterprise (2023-11-21).

The innovation analogy does real work. Innovation is typically defined as creating value someone is willing to pay for. Risk innovation runs the same logic on risk: transform creative ideas about how we think about risk into frameworks and processes people actually want to use (2020-07-30). The market’s equivalent is the constituency: individuals, communities, and organizations — including developers and manufacturers themselves — who hold something of tangible value they are willing to invest in protecting (2016-01-11).

From this follows a predictive claim about failure. The risk landscape an enterprise faces is modulated in part by how it threatens what is of value to others (2023-11-21). Ventures that ignore the personal and social dimensions of value are “supremely vulnerable to failure” because they run the danger of “inadvertently threatening what people are prepared to fight for” (2016-01-11). In complex, non-linear systems this failure mode is characteristically invisible: things look as if they are thriving until seemingly-insignificant, overlooked events lead to catastrophic failure (2020-11-05). Hence the reflexive corollary: “our outmoded ideas about risk actually become a risk in themselves and threaten the future we aspire to” (2020-11-05).

The framework is operationalized, not just stated. With the Risk Innovation Nexus team at ASU, Andrew distilled the neglected part of the landscape into eighteen “orphan risks” — “those hard to quantify and easy to ignore risks that nevertheless have a habit of coming back to bite” (quote 2020-11-05, the count of eighteen per 2023-11-21; the coinage has its own page: Orphan risks) — and built the Risk Innovation Planner, a two-page tool whose design brief was: “if we had 30 minutes to sit down with the founder of a startup to help them develop a risk innovation mindset that provided them with a competitive advantage, how could we do this?” (2023-11-21). The Planner walks a user from identifying areas of value — for the enterprise, investors, customers, and community — to mapping the orphan risks that threaten them, to three simple next-quarter actions, closed with a quarterly reflection. It deliberately does not provide answers: it is “a catalyst for helping people and organizations who are highly time constrained and lack breadth of context or expertise to understand and navigate a risk landscape that might otherwise be hidden from them” (2023-11-21) — an early, concrete instance of the catalyst stance the initiative later made its philosophy.

Finally, the reframe generalizes. Because risk-as-threat-to-value treats risk as a balance between maintaining existing value and enabling the creation of future value, it converts risk from a barrier to progress into a way of supporting beneficial and sustainable progress (2016-01-11; 2024-08-25) — and by 2024 Andrew was using it explicitly as the foundation of his quadrant framework for navigating advanced technology transitions (2024-08-25). The idea was never AI-only: it was forged on nanotechnology and entrepreneurship, tested against astrobiology, and applies wherever transformative technologies threaten — or promise — things people care about that numbers do not capture.

Lineage

In his own words

One way to do this is to consider risk as a threat to value, and not just in the ways value is usually thought of when assessing risk, such as health, the environment or financial gain/loss. We need to also include less tangible but equally important measures of value — well-being, environmental sustainability, deeply held beliefs, even a sense of cultural or personal identity.”

— Thinking innovatively about the risks of tech innovation (AI-readable mirror), 2016-01-11 (first published at The Conversation).

Just as technology innovation seeks to transform creative ideas into products that people want to buy, risk innovation seeks to transform creative ideas around how we think about risk into frameworks and processes that people want to use. It’s a way of thinking about risk that generates new knowledge, understanding, or capabilities and translates these into products, tools, or practices that protect what we consider to be of value.”

— Life on Mars, Astrobiology, and Thinking Differently about Risk (AI-readable mirror), 2020-07-30.

This framing is explicitly focused on “value” as it relates to products, ideas, and processes, that have worth to organizations and others, and not “values” — which are more closely associated with what is considered good or bad rather than what something is worth. … Values are, of course, important, and they often underpin the value that a company aspires to create (as well as how it creates it). But values are not the same as value — a nuance that is often missed …”

— Could OpenAI have benefitted from this tool for navigating complex risks? (AI-readable mirror), 2023-11-21.

Engagement and reception

Dated, checkable evidence of external engagement with risk innovation is currently thin in this corpus, and we say so plainly — treat that as an absence of record, not a verdict on the idea: conceptual reframings of this kind typically spread slowly and indirectly, and we do not solicit reception. What the sources establish: the framework was carried into the peer-reviewed literature via an article in the journal Astrobiology (2018, per the 2020-07-30 post it underpins); Andrew presented it — applied to AI risk and benefit — to a National Academies of Science-sponsored symposium series in 2021, well before ChatGPT (per the 2023-08-08 repost); and as the Risk Innovation Nexus’s seed-funded phase wrapped up, its tools and resources were committed to remaining freely available (2020-11-05). The corpus reception page does not yet record independent third-party engagement specific to risk innovation; the most visible continuation of the program is Andrew’s own July 2026 orphan-risks preprint, covered on the Orphan risks page.

Where to go deeper

Full essays (the risk innovation arc, oldest first — each with canonical and AI-readable links):

Papers: Orphan Risks at the Frontier of Artificial Intelligence (SSRN, July 2026; doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.7068898) — the orphan-risks strand of the program applied to frontier AI companies’ safety frameworks.

Related ideas-ring pages: Orphan risks — the named risk class this framework navigates; Advanced technology transitions — the initiative-era framework built on the value balance; Trust over metrics — the same suspicion of the merely countable, applied to impact rather than risk.

Related corpus pages: Scholarship — where risk innovation sits in the four-phase career arc (phase 3: risk science, risk innovation, responsible innovation, 2010–present); Philosophy — the catalyst stance the Planner prefigures.