2025 has been a wildly volatile year, with major economic swings from tariffs, intense changes in policy, and backlash to sustainability, along with the continued rise of hype around AI. I’ve heard from clients around the world that they are experiencing a near-total decision-making paralysis, as it’s impossible to make any type of long-term commitment when the facts on the ground are changing as quickly and as intensely as they have been this year. But are these dire anecdotes representative of the state of innovation? To answer these questions, we’re launching the 2025 Lux Innovation Survey, with the goal of illuminating the real challenges facing innovators and providing a shared benchmark for how companies are responding to these challenges. This isn’t our first Innovation Survey, but we are taking a different approach this year by focusing our questions on two themes that have dominated 2025: 1) deglobalization, exploring how trade barriers and tariffs are impacting innovation management and planning, and 2) AI, seeking to understand how mature the use of AI is in innovation and what impact it’s having on speed and effectiveness. I’ll explore our hypotheses in more detail, but first, I encourage you to take the survey: It should take only about 5–10 minutes, and survey participants will get access to the results.
Deglobalization has been rising since at least 2016, marked by events like Brexit and Trump’s first election, if not earlier. Despite that, I was skeptical that deglobalization would fully move from cultural trend to core policy until recently. It seemed that the economies of the U.S. and China were too integrated to have a meaningful split, and I ignored evidence like the first U.S.-China trade war and EU-Russia energy decoupling. Like many, I’ve changed my tune on this in the past two years, as deglobalizing innovation policy has played a significant part in my change of opinion. It now seems like the U.S. and China are moving toward a more permanent split on key industries of the future – including green energy, EVs, and chips — not just in manufacturing but even in IP. As these sectors occupy an increasingly larger share of the economy, that split will become more pronounced. Anecdotally, this appears to have had significant impacts on innovators. Even during Trump’s first term, Western companies frequently asked us about Chinese startups. That interest in cross-border open innovation appears to have faded under the current political climate. With this survey, we want to understand how companies are reallocating innovation resources in response to these deglobalization pressures. Are they opening new regional innovation centers? How are they planning to respond to the potential divergence of markets? And perhaps most importantly, is there a consensus that deglobalization is here to stay? If yes, it alone could shift markets in that direction as innovators create and launch new products for different regions.
I may have reevaluated my stance on deglobalization recently, but I’ve always been confident that AI is the real deal. Despite this, I often play the skeptic in client and public conversations, as hype and expectations around AI remain exceptionally inflated. What’s interesting is that major AI players are focusing on innovation as a key market for AI: Nvidia has consistently positioned AI as a key tool to accelerate scientific discovery with Jensen Huang continuing to promote opportunities in science and medicine, and Google recently launched its AI “co-scientist,” which it claims successfully proposed drug repurposing candidates. The investment is real — but is AI r truly driving corporate innovation? Our survey explores its adoption and impact, and I’m especially interested in how it’s being used. Many large companies focus on decision support or automation, such as Google’s AI-generated drug candidates, which suggests high impact. But if most use-cases are limited to faster email writing, the impact is far more modest.
By taking the survey, you can help uncover these answers. Over my decade at Lux, I’ve had the privilege of working with a diverse, forward-thinking community of innovators. I’m confident that by pooling our insights, we can make sense of these thorny issues and navigate this unprecedented time. I encourage you to participate: You’ll gain access to the results and help provide direction in this time of uncertainty.