Shaun Hendy is Chief Scientist at Toha, and was the founder and first director of Te Pūnaha Matatini from 2015-2021. His interest in the science of complexity stems from a conversation at a lunchtime journal club at Industrial Research Ltd about Geoffrey West’s work on the increase in the number of patents per capita with city size in the United States. Shaun then downloaded an international patent database and found that the difference in patents per capita between Australia and New Zealand could be explained by the difference in population distributions.