The toxoplasmosis innovation portfo

There's a brain parasite that makes mice fearless.
Infected mice walk up to everything—cats, foxes, human hands.
They die fast.

Same parasite in wolves? A 26-year Yellowstone study found infected wolves were 46 times more likely to become pack leaders.

Same intervention. 
Opposite outcomes.

Mice survive by avoiding risk.
Wolves survive by taking it.

Inject fearlessness into a mouse and you remove its only defense—no claws, no pack, no hunting skills to fall back on. Inject it into a wolf and you amplify capabilities it already has: pack coordination, hunting experience, the ability to survive a failed chase.

This is exactly how innovation works in companies.

🐁 Boeing spent 50 years avoiding risk.

The 737 launched in 1968. Every variant for five decades was careful, iterative refinement. No bold redesigns. No new platforms. That WAS their advantage—engineering perfection through risk avoidance.

Then Airbus launched the A320neo in 2011. Boeing needed to respond fast.

So they bolted new engines onto a 50-year-old design. Cut development from 7-10 years to 5. Overruled engineers who raised concerns. The culture had shifted—post-merger leadership wanted to "run it like a business rather than a great engineering firm."

They injected fearlessness into an organization built for caution.
346 people died. $20+ billion in losses. Criminal charges.

🐺 Nvidia spent 30 years taking risks.

Gaming GPUs funded the company, but Jensen Huang kept hunting. He bet $12 billion on CUDA from 2006-2017 while Wall Street called it a waste. He pushed into mobile with Tegra—lost hundreds of millions when Qualcomm crushed them. He pivoted those resources into AI.

Nvidia's unofficial motto? "Our company is thirty days from going out of business." Always hunting. But with infrastructure to survive failed hunts: multiple revenue streams, a culture of "intellectual honesty" about what's working, and runway to keep swinging.

The same fearlessness that killed Boeing made Nvidia the most valuable company in the world.
The pattern is organizational, not industrial.

Mice survive by not engaging threats (operational perfection).
Wolves survive by engaging them repeatedly (learning from failure).
Most companies are mice with wolf ambitions.

Mice can become wolves.
But they can't just "decide to innovate."

They need infrastructure first:

Economics: Potentially years of runway

Portfolio: Enough revenue streams so one failure isn't fatal

Culture: "What did we learn?" over "did we hit the number?"

Systems: Kill bad projects fast, only scale good ones

Leadership: People with scar tissue from smart failures

Miss one and you're still a mouse.

Your innovation portfolio isn't the problem.
It's mice pretending to be wolves that kills them.

Become a wolf first. 
Then get infected.

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Source: Nature (2022): “Parasitic infection increases risk-taking in a social, intermediate host: Evidence from gray wolves in Yellowstone”