Collective theranostics and postgenomics entrepreneurship: rethinking innovations as knowledge ecosystems built by complex collaboration

Some might think science is a romantic endeavor. The classic ‘Edisonian’ lens of science has advanced precisely that vision: ‘the lone genius’. While this (false) metaphor of solitary scientific practice in a laboratory detached from society has prevailed for the past 400 years since the Enlightenment, ‘game changing’ transformative ideas do not hatch in a vacuum. Science and innovation are inherently social, political and collective activities [2–6,101]. They require a favorable innovation climate or milieu, be it information systems, crossfunctional knowledge teams, understanding of organizational behavior, healthcare management, social and even meteorological climate [7,8]. The building and sustenance of research infrastructures and scientific discoveries can be stifled when these forces intersect and interact unfavorably. Theranostics is the merger of therapeutics with diagnostics in the current era of postgenomics data-intensive life sciences [9–12]. As suggested in the quote above, how we formulate the scientific questions in theranostics – as a solitary or collective activity – will be one of the most crucial drivers of innovation. Prainsack notes in her interview, for example, that theranostics may be a game changer as it entails new ways of ‘doing science’ [12]. Indeed, far from being a solitary research led by individual scientists, theranostics knowledge is truly transdisciplinary, application and collective innovationoriented, and coproduced in multiple scales and locales, both inside and outside academia [12,13]. In this editorial, we underscore that whenever knowledge traverses disciplinary, ontological, epistemological (i.e., ways of knowing; how do we know what we know?), organizational, political and geographical boundaries, the need for Collective theranostics and postgenomics entrepreneurship: rethinking innovations as knowledge ecosystems built by complex collaboration