Beyond the Endless Frontier

The National Science Foundation’s Directorate of Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships (NSF-TIP) recently issued a request for information on a new “Tech Labs” program. From the RFI:

“Tech Labs will support full-time research, development and innovation (RDI) teams focused on overcoming persistent barriers to the commercialization of emerging technologies. These teams will benefit from operational autonomy, milestone-based funding and the ability to engage across academia, industry, national laboratories, and nonprofit sectors.”

Getting this program right is critical for the future of ambitious research in the US. If it’s successful, other agencies will hopefully copy and riff on it. Like so many new approaches to research funding and management, Tech Labs could go one of two ways: it can unlock a whole world of ideas that wouldn’t have seen the light of day, or it can experience mean reversion and capture by incumbent institutions.

We submitted the following response:

Which types of teams and organizations should be considered eligible to apply for the NSF Tech Labs program? What restrictions on team eligibility should be in place to maximize speed and ensure novel impact?

First, let’s enumerate the thing that would blunt tech labs speed and novel impact:

• Employees, especially leadership, who are simultaneously employed at other organizations after

  phase 0. This is especially true for professors and grad students. A fuzzier line is a situation where the leadership has some explicit agreement that they have a job waiting for them when the tech lab ends, like a professor on leave. This latter situation is also hard to enforce. One common important-to-avoid problem is the professor who is officially on leave, but in practice is still supervising a lab’s worth of grad students “on the side”

• If the tech labs org was a subsidiary of a large organization that has the ability to dictate things like research priorities, how money is spent, and how IP is assigned.

• If the people in the tech lab were spending a lot of their time doing outside fundraising and mixing a lot of money that has different requirements. This is another tricky one: there are definitely ways to leverage private funding, but seeking it out and aligning it all in the same direction is a huge distraction (especially during the tech labs period).

• If the lab did not own its core IP (ie. it was licensing it from a university or company.)

• If the lab has