Le Think Tank est mort. Vive le Network.

Listen carefully, and you'll hear it: the creaking of another twentieth-century institution straining under twenty-first-century pressures. This time, it's the think tank—that peculiar invention of the policy world that has shaped governments and economies for over a century. But like the newspaper before it and the department store before that, the traditional think tank is facing its Kodak moment. And just as Kodak invented digital photography only to be destroyed by it, today's think tanks have glimpsed their future but seem powerless to grasp it.

I've spent four decades watching industries transform or die. The pattern is always the same: incumbents grow fat on yesterday's model while nimble outsiders build tomorrow's. What I've just finished reading—a remarkable manifesto on reimagining the think tank—isn't merely academic speculation. It's a blueprint for creative destruction in the knowledge industry.

Think Tank traces their evolutions from their genteel origins in Victorian clubs to their current incarnation as multi-million-dollar influence machines. It's a journey I know well—I've watched similar evolutions in technology, media, and finance. The Brookings Institution helping design the Marshall Plan in 1948, RAND Corporation imagining nuclear strategy in underground bunkers, Heritage Foundation essentially writing Reagan's policy playbook—these were the Google, Facebook, and Amazon of their era. They aggregated talent, monopolized attention, and shaped the world.

But here's what the establishment misses: their very success contains the seeds of their obsolescence. Traditional think tanks are centralized in an age of decentralization, opaque in an era demanding transparency, and glacially slow when the world changes at Twitter speed. They hoard expertise in Washington and London while the best insights on urban resilience might come from Jakarta, the future of digital currency from Kenya, or pandemic response from South Korea.

Enter the Networked Guild Enterprise—a model as different from today's think tanks as Uber is from the taxi commission. Instead of employing fifty researchers in a Massachusetts Avenue townhouse, imagine activating five thousand experts across ninety countries on demand. Rather than guarding deliberations behind closed doors, picture livestreaming policy labs for anyone to watch and contribute. Think Wikipedia meets McKinsey meets the original medieval guilds—a platform for collective intelligence that's transparent, meritocratic, and radically inclusive.

The parallels to Silicon Valley disruption are unmistakable. Just as Airbnb owns no hotels yet dominates hospitality, the next-generation think tank needs no marble headquarters. Like GitHub transformed software development from corporate secret to open collaboration, policy research can shift from institutional privilege to networked effort. The same forces that turned newspapers inside out—democratized distribution, crowd-sourced content, radical transparency—are about to hit the policy world.

What strikes me most is the economic elegance of this model. Traditional think tanks are venture capital's nightmare: high fixed costs, lumpy revenue, limited scalability. The networked model flips this entirely. It's asset-light—no permanent staff to carry. It's scalable—adding the thousandth expert costs the same as the tenth. It's antifragile—if one node fails, the network routes around it. This isn't just organizational innovation; it's business model innovation of the highest order.

Some strong examples already emerging. During COVID-19, ad hoc networks of experts outpaced established institutions in everything from vaccine development to supply chain fixes. The climate policy world increasingly operates through fluid coalitions rather than fixed institutes. Even China, hardly a bastion of institutional innovation, has realized that thousands of distributed think tanks might serve better than a few massive ones.

But perhaps the most radical shift is in metrics. Traditional think tanks measure success by proximity to power—did the Secretary of State read our report? The networked model measures impact on lives—did communities actually benefit? It's the difference between vanity metrics and value creation, between counting press clips and counting outcomes.

The resistance will be fierce, of course. Incumbents never go gently. Foundation program officers who've spent decades cultivating relationships with prestigious institutions won't easily shift to funding networks. Academics who've built careers on institutional affiliation will defend their ivory towers. Government officials comfortable with their Rolodex of usual suspects will resist opening the conversation to voices from Nairobi or Mumbai.

But resistance is futile when the underlying economics shift. The networked model isn't just morally superior—bringing diverse voices to policy conversations. It's economically superior—delivering better insights faster and cheaper. And in the end, economics always wins.

What we're witnessing is the unbundling of the think tank, much as we saw the unbundling of the newspaper, the bank, and the university. Each function—research, convening, publishing, advocacy—can be performed better by a specialized network than a generalist institution. The question isn't whether this will happen, but how fast and who will lead it.

The smart money would bet on the builders of these new networks. Not the McKinseys trying to bolt on a digital arm, but the true natives who think network-first. Not the Brookings attempting to modernize, but the entrepreneurs building from scratch. The opportunity is massive: the global think tank industry, broadly defined, influences trillions in government spending and policy decisions affecting billions of lives.

As Jerry Yang said in Yahoo's early days. "The internet, makes geography irrelevant and credentials optional." He was talking about information, but he might as well have been describing the future of expertise. The think tank as a physical institution in a specific city credentialing specific experts is as doomed as the printed encyclopedia.

The Horizon Institute, which the authors propose as the first true Networked Guild Enterprise, may or may not succeed. First movers often don't. But the model they're pioneering—transparent, global, fluid, accountable—is inevitable. Someone will crack the code, build the platform, and aggregate the network effects. When they do, the policy world will never be the same.

The think tank is dead. Long live the network. And for those wise enough to see it, the opportunity has never been greater.

‍