What a Reactor is
A Reactor is not a doctoral programme, nor a consultancy, nor an incubator. But it has elements of all three. It is a temporary device installed inside an organisation to do something that organisation, on its own, almost never manages: to take a hunch as far as the point where somebody can decide about it.
Most organisations that do research have the same difficulties. They produce knowledge efficiently (papers, patents, theses, reports) and then wait for that knowledge to turn into impact by itself. It doesn't. Doing research and developing technology does not guarantee innovation: R&D produces knowledge; innovating is what turns that knowledge into value. They are two different processes, with different logics, and almost nobody organises the second one.
The Reactor organises the second one. For a few months it brings together a small group of people with deliberately different profiles, gives them a method, a problem and a rhythm, and puts them under useful pressure: having to prove, over and over, that what they are doing matters.
The starting point
The Reactor starts from an uncomfortable and very productive premise: you don't start with an idea, you start with a hunch.
This inverts the usual order. Almost every innovation programme asks for a brilliant idea and then looks for someone to sell it to. The Reactor does the opposite: it starts from an imperfect hunch about a problem and spends the effort on understanding that problem until it becomes manageable. It is what I call reverse entrepreneurship: the problem first, the solution afterwards, if it ever arrives.
The practical consequence is that the first thing you prototype is not the solution: it is the problem. A problem is workable when it meets three conditions: that it is solvable, that it is recognisable (you can describe what would make the solution possible) and that it is verifiable, that is, that there is some way of knowing whether it has really been solved. A problem that doesn't meet all three is not a problem: it is a complaint.
How the work runs
Four modules, teams of three to five people from different disciplines and an assessment at the end of each one. Between sessions, fieldwork and mentoring.
- The problem and the hunchesYou start from a hunch and put it through the structure of a problem. The team goes out to talk to experts made available to them (through the programme or by their own means), to front-line operators and to the people affected, not to confirm their hypothesis but to try to destroy it. What they are listening for is "you are wrong", and why.
- Parts and scaleThis is the least intuitive logic in the method: bringing the scale of the problem down until it fits the resources you already have. And building with existing parts (technologies, data, knowledge, capabilities) reused and re-proposed for something else. Innovating is not necessarily expensive; it almost never starts out that way.
- The opportunity spaceWith the problem now manageable, you mark out where there is real opportunity to create value and you manage the risks that come with it. It is not about choosing the best idea, but about turning an idea into something a decision can be taken on: carry on, vary it, scale it up, invest or stop.
- Final report and scaling logicEach team hands in the problem reframed with what they have learnt, the inventory of what is still unresolved and the logic of how it grows. It is a document you can pass to somebody else and that somebody else can pick up.
What makes it different
The panel that tries to knock it down
A panel that assesses every milestone with an explicit mandate: find out why this is not going to work. It is not a friendly tribunal but a mechanism that stops a team spending six months on an elegant solution to a problem nobody feels.
The problem gets prototyped
Before building anything you have to make the problem tangible: simulate it, mock it up or define how you would know it had been solved. That is what separates this method from an ideation workshop.
Deliberately uncomfortable teams
A core team of 10 to 25 people, organised into working groups of three to five, from disciplines that don't usually meet. Whoever generates ideas is rarely the person who scales them, and neither of them is the expert who knows how to discard them. The method needs all three profiles at the same table.
Expert mentoring in research and knowledge transfer
Researchers from the organisation itself and players from the ecosystem work alongside the teams. Knowledge doesn't come in from outside to explain: the knowledge already inside is activated and connected to what is missing.
Seven in-house AI agents and a specific mapping of resources
A chain of assistants designed specifically for the method, which accompanies the teams between sessions. It doesn't replace the fieldwork: it puts it in order and subjects it to criticism.
It leaves capability behind
When it finishes, the organisation isn't left with a report: it is left with a group of people who have done the whole route and know how to repeat it. That is the result being sought.
What comes out of a Reactor
The third edition at the Universidad Pública de Navarra closed in June 2026 with four proposals, all of them born from a hunch and taken to the point where a decision could be made about them.
- Early detection of forest fires
A sensor network combining technologies already on the market, adapted to the terrain and extendable in stages as needs require.
Paula Corella Guillamón, Aitor Ezker Galech and Anaraida García Baigorri.
Press coverage
- Control system for the European grapevine moth A response to a pest whose behaviour is changing with the climate, framed from the resources of the sector itself. Unai Fernández Ortega, Amaia Gastearena Irigoyen, Cristina Goya Gárriz, Nerea Sarasa Gil and Eduardo Zudaire Belda.
- Surplus food at airports Handling the food discarded today in airport operations, reframed as a logistics problem and not a waste one.
- Managing and assessing urban waste Measurement and decision-making on urban waste in a municipal setting, with the focus on what can be verified.
The four proposals and the closing ceremony, in the Universidad Pública de Navarra press release.