Look into capsules, also [1-3] can give you an idea of what can be explored. Evolving NNs [4] would probably benefit the most from NN primitives research. IMO, the best source of ideas for novel primitives is neocortex [5, 6].

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.03955 [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.11168 [3] https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.02961 [4] https://www.nature.com/articles/s42256-018-0006-z [5] https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.00161 [6] https://arxiv.org/abs/1511.00083