In a different domain. For a different kind of complex system. The intellectual move is the same: take a system whose behaviour is hard to see, build rigorous models to make that behaviour legible, and give the institutions that govern it something they can actually act on.
In 1995, Andrew Barrie and John Hibbert started as consultants helping financial institutions manage market risk. The problem they were solving: complex financial systems produce behaviours — regime switches, correlated failures, tail risks — that are invisible to the institutions responsible for governing them. Standard tools were inadequate. New models were needed.
Over sixteen years, Barrie & Hibbert built those models. Stochastic scenario generators. Regime-switching equity models. Full-yield-curve frameworks for actuarial use. Economic scenario generators used by insurers, pension funds, and asset managers across four continents. In 2011, Moody's Analytics acquired the company for $77.6M.
The parallel is not superficial. Barrie & Hibbert's core insight was that financial institutions were making consequential decisions about systems they did not understand well enough — because the models they were using were inadequate for the complexity they faced. The same is true of regional economies. The stewards of innovation ecosystems are making consequential decisions — about programmes, funding, strategy — based on activity metrics that do not capture what the system is actually doing.
"Coordination should be carried by infrastructure, not by people. When coordination is infrastructural, collaboration becomes repeatable, pathways become routable, and complexity becomes manageable rather than fragile."
ClusterOS is built by Community Lab — a digital infrastructure company based in Edinburgh. Community Lab builds sovereign, federated infrastructure for ecosystem builders: the platform layer that allows networks to organise, scale, and coordinate without losing autonomy.
ClusterOS is the diagnostic intelligence layer that sits above the platform — identifying what the ecosystem is doing, why it is doing it, and where the leverage points are. The two products are architecturally distinct but intellectually continuous: both are premised on the idea that coordination should be carried by infrastructure, not by people.
The diagnostic pipeline is live. 75 completed runs. If you steward a regional economy and want to understand what it is actually doing — get in touch.
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