An originator product is the first molecule. The novel mechanism. Years of failed trials distilled into something that didn’t exist before it reached anyone. It didn’t copy a pathway—it carved one.
A biosimilar comes later. It replicates the molecule closely enough to be equivalent, then competes on access: price, choice, availability. It inherits the pathway rather than carving it.
Both matter. They’re different relationships to the work.
The question isn’t “which is better?” That’s a competition frame, and competition frames produce hierarchies. The real question is: what are you contributing to the lineage?
This is for professionals—people trained into competence—who feel their volition thinning under compliance, optimization, and borrowed scripts, and who want the courage to encounter something directly again.
Freshness is contact with reality
The originator advantage isn’t being first chronologically. It’s freshness, which is not the same as novelty.
Novelty is surface: a remix, a new angle, a clever recombination. With the same inputs, many people can produce it eventually.
Freshness is structural. It means you touched the problem itself, its friction, its constraints, its weird edges. Something in your output still carries that contact. Fresh work doesn’t just sound smart. It feels true.
I felt that difference recently in a way analytics can’t fully explain. Policy Vault—a project I’d been building to structure pharmacy coverage criteria—spiked to ~35,000 page views in three days. The spike was the clean part. The messy part came first: extraction runs that failed at 2 a.m., clauses that refused to parse cleanly, countless edge cases, a workflow that worked on ten documents and collapsed at a hundred, pages I shipped that nobody visited. When a signal like that finally arrives, it doesn’t just validate—it tells you you’ve touched a real surface in the world. Someone needed what you made. That’s freshness: not novelty, but traction earned through contact.
Most of us skip contact. The pressure to appear competent pushes us toward inheritance: reading what others concluded, adopting their stance, borrowing their certainty. But the struggle is where freshness lives. And freshness is what makes work worth contributing.
The biosimilar ethic
Biosimilar contribution isn’t lesser. It’s distributive.
It says: if a pathway exists, widen it. Lower the cost of access. Increase choice. Power up end-user agency. This is healthcare after all.
In creative and intellectual work, biosimilar contribution looks like translation, compression, implementation, teaching, and tooling—helping an insight travel to the people who need it. That isn’t copying. That’s public utility.
The failure mode isn’t being downstream. We’re all downstream of someone. The failure mode is extraction without contribution: taking from the lineage without adding to it, claiming originality you didn’t earn, or hoarding pathways others could walk with joy and curious fervor.
Two things break lineage fastest
Extraction without credit and meaning bent for convenience.
One steals the person. The other steals the idea.
The first is obvious: scraping and repackaging as if the source never existed—digesting someone else’s work and presenting it as yours.
The second is subtler: remixing until the stance is gone—until what was true becomes merely useful, until the idea is hollowed out and repurposed to fit someone else’s incentives. You see it when “here’s what I actually believe” becomes “here’s what will perform well”—same words, emptied of stance. Fear often helps this happen. Not fear as danger—fear as professionalism, composure, strategy. The quiet voice that says: don’t be first to name what you see.
Stance: the engine of freshness
Fresh contribution rarely comes from genius. It comes from stance.
A stance isn’t an opinion. Opinions are cheap and reversible. A stance has cost. It forecloses options. It says: I’m oriented this way, which means I can’t be oriented every way.
Most people don’t need to invent originality. They need to excavate what’s already true about how they see—shaped by what they’ve lived, what they keep noticing, what they can’t stop caring about.
That excavation feels like carving a pathway because it is. You’re not copying someone else’s route to clarity. You’re encountering yourself directly—struggling with what you think—and producing something that couldn’t have come from anyone else.
That’s originator work. And everyone is capable of it.
Lineage without hierarchy
Here’s the reframing: if “originator” becomes a status category, we recreate the same hierarchy that makes creative work feel inaccessible.
Originator isn’t “higher.” It’s earlier in a chain.
Every piece of work sits in a lineage. Someone carved a pathway. Others refined it, applied it, taught it, made it accessible. The originator’s contribution is generative; the downstream contributor’s work is distributive. Both add. The only non-contribution is extraction.
The contribution ethic keeps credit flowing. It shares methods, not just conclusions. It makes structures legible and revisable rather than mystified and fixed.
The originator’s responsibility
If you carve a pathway—if you produce something fresh—you inherit responsibility.
Not to protect it. Not to hoard it. Not to build a moat and extract rent from everyone who wants to use it.
Your responsibility is simpler: make the pathway walkable.
Document process, not just conclusions. Leave markers, like a cairn—a stack of rough stones marking the turn on a unique trail. Make the contribution legible enough that others can build on it, challenge it, extend it, or depart from it consciously.
The obvious objection is practical: if I make it walkable, someone will copy it and outrun me. Sometimes that happens. But copying is not the same as contact. What can’t be cloned is your ongoing relationship with the terrain—the constraints you’re embedded in, the repeated encounters, the stake that makes you notice what you notice.
Openness isn’t surrender. It’s a choice of economy: guarded tricks or legible contribution. And if your work is an invitation to think—not a tactic to hoard—then being copied is less a theft of your future than proof you opened something worth walking.
The originator who shares becomes infrastructure.
A closing practice
If you want more voice and less borrowed posture, run this once a week: pick one real surface you encountered—a user email, a broken workflow, a conversation you can’t shake—and reflect on what reality resisted and what shifted in your stance. Integrate two influences you’re building on into the fresh stance. Then leave one marker someone else could use.
Do that for four weeks. You’ll feel it: less performance, more contact. Less inheritance, more voice.
The originator’s contribution isn’t dominance.
It’s opening.
