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Bucks for Brains

Funding will add more world-class researchers.

Autism Research

New AI-powered tool that could help diagnose autism at a younger age

Pandemic Research

New NIH research targets viral RNA.

Growing Industry

UofL launches statewide manufacturing resource center.

Research with Impact

The University of Louisville is a premier, metropolitan research institution bursting with creativity and ideas. The vision of the Office of Research and Innovation is to support those ideas, helping them grow and spread so they can change, improve and even save lives.

We do this by providing support for our scholarly community as they work to explore and increase our collective understanding of the world through art, science, business and a multitude of different disciplines. We also teach our students the value of those pursuits, molding them into the next generation of thinkers, creators, explorers and leaders.

UofL is an ambitious institution continuously meeting the bar, then setting it higher. Our national and international vision and scope recognizes our campus’ leadership role in advancing understanding and transforming the lives of the people and institutions both on- and off-campus, throughout the city, state, country and world.

“ UofL research is being used to help to improve lives and expand our understanding of the world and our place in it .”

– Jon Klein, UofL Interim Executive Vice President for Research and Innovation

OFFICE ANNOUNCEMENTS

Announcing expanded internal grant programs for spring 2022 (April 2022)

Open Sharing of Research Outputs

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NEWS STORIES

• Jul 30 Three UofL students, one engaging summer
• Jul 16 UofL grads win prestigious awards, including seven Fulbrights
• Jul 09 UofL researchers gain $3.6 million to study and prevent effects of arsenic exposure
• May 15 UofL receives $3M to further biomedical research

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Research & Innovation

We put your ideas in motion.

Finding transportation solutions

In a rapidly changing world, research and innovation enable MnDOT to continuously improve how it designs and delivers infrastructure, how it operates the system, and how it responds to problems and issues as they arise. This work helps MnDOT understand what Minnesotans need and expect from their transportation system and the effects of this system on the economy and the environment.

Check out our 2023 Annual Report (PDF) to see how we're making a difference.

Research updates

Mndot, lrrb accepting proposals.

July 31, 2024 – Proposals for the 2024 Academic Research Solicitation are due Sept. 10.

Recording available: Telecommuting during COVID-19 webinar

July 21, 2022 - A recording of the "Telecommuting During COVID-19" webinar is now available on YouTube .

Recording available: Extreme flood Vulnerability Assessment Tool webinar

March 24, 2022 - A recording of the "Extreme Flood Vulnerability Assessment Tool" webinar is now available on YouTube .

Recording available: Human centered design webinar

June 7, 2021 - A recording of the Office of Research & Innovation's "Human Centered Design" webinar is now available on YouTube .

Recording available: Winter Research Lightning Talks webinar

March 1, 2021 - A recording of the Office of Research & Innovation and Office of Maintenance's "Winter Research Lightning Talks" is now available on YouTube .

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Research and innovation

Leading innovation through eu research.

Investing in research and innovation is investing in Europe’s future. It helps us to compete globally and preserve our unique social model. It improves the daily lives of millions of people here in Europe and around the world, helping to solve some of our biggest societal challenges.

EU support for research and innovation adds value by encouraging cooperation between research teams across countries and disciplines that is vital in making breakthrough discoveries.

• Goals of EU research and innovation policy
• Summaries of EU legislation on research and innovation

Through its multiannual research and innovation framework programmes, the EU provides funding to:

• strengthen the EU’s position in science
• strengthen industrial innovation, including investment in key technologies, greater access to capital and support for small businesses
• address major social concerns, such as climate change, sustainable transport and renewable energy
• ensure technological breakthroughs are developed into viable products with real commercial potential – by building partnerships with industry and governments
• step up international cooperation on research & innovation
• Main EU funding programme for research and innovation
• All funding opportunities for research and innovation

EU research and innovation activities are managed, through a number of departments, agencies and bodies , and results, knowledge and data are shared through:

• Project databases
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• The EU research and innovation magazine

Publication

Related EU topics

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• Infographic - European Research Area
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Our teams leverage research developments across domains to build tools and technology that impact billions of people. Sharing our learnings and tools to fuel progress in the field is core to our approach.

Our resources are available to everyone

We regularly share datasets, tools and services with the broader scientific community to be used, shared, and built on.

Furthering America's Research Enterprise (2014)

Chapter: 3 understanding the pathways from research to innovation.

3 Understanding the Pathways from Research to Innovation

KEY POINTS IN THIS CHAPTER

• The benefits of scientific research—particularly basic research—include not only innovation but also contributions to a trained workforce and to the infrastructure that enables further research and the use of scientific discoveries.
• It is impossible to predict all of the outcomes or benefits to which basic research might lead. It is equally impossible to predict all the types of research knowledge that will contribute to a future transformative innovation.
• Maintaining a level of preparedness that will allow America to benefit from discoveries made elsewhere is essential. To maintain this level of preparedness, government needs to support world-class basic research in all major areas of science.
• Metrics for evaluating and policies for supporting the translation of university research into industrial innovations need to be varied and flexible to reflect the diversity of academic institutions and firms and their interactions.
• The translation of research discoveries into economically and socially viable innovations frequently is subject to a time lag that in many cases reflects the often prohibitive cost and risk associated with proof-of-concept research. As discussed in

Chapter 6 , government support for such research may be essential to overcome this barrier to the development of innovations.

• The international flow of people and ideas plays an increasingly important role in the U.S. research enterprise. This flow is supported in part by worldwide networks of researchers that advance research and enable access to a vast stock of knowledge and technological approaches offering opportunities for commercialization.

The committee’s implicit charge for this study was to identify ways of increasing the output of the U.S. research system. Although the desired outputs are numerous, Congress and others have placed particular emphasis on economic gains, so we give special attention to those contributions here, noting that these gains depend on numerous factors that cannot easily be predicted or controlled, such as the widespread adoption of an innovation. In exploring how the United States might enhance the economic benefits gained from science, we focus on one goal in particular: for the United States to be at the forefront of global competition for new technologies and other innovations. A framework for supporting this goal through a greater understanding of the system of research is described in Chapter 6 . We focus on this goal not only because innovative technologies are profitable in and of themselves, but also because focusing on this goal enables one to understand how the research enterprise advances national goals in general. This chapter describes the complex, lengthy, and often unpredictable pathways that lead from research to innovations that yield economic and other benefits for U.S. society, illustrated by a set of detailed examples.

THE LINKS BETWEEN RESEARCH AND INNOVATION

As discussed briefly in Chapter 1 and in greater detail in Chapter 4 , measuring the economic and other returns of research is not an easy task. Attempts to trace major innovations back to their original supporting research have rarely if ever revealed a direct flow of “money in, value out.” In the majority of cases, such exercises illuminate a tangled and complex yet rich and fertile path from the original investment to the final impacts on society. They reveal layer upon layer of small impacts scattered across many places, as well as coincidental exchanges of information that gradually steered the path of everyday research toward a transformative breakthrough, one that could not have been predicted (Martin and Tang, 2006).

Yet if one looks more closely at the months, years, and decades pre-

ceding transformative breakthroughs, subtle clues emerge. It becomes clear that chance favors the prepared mind. Along the path to discovery, certain grounds become more fertile, and certain environments more conducive to major innovations. Recognizing particularly fertile avenues for research often requires a close familiarity with “dry wells”—dead ends or failures in the development of scientific knowledge. Scientific knowledge thus advances through failures as well as successes, a point emphasized throughout this report. In fact, every failure in science can be considered a discovery in the sense that the project may not have achieved its original goal, but the failure plays an important role by pointing research in a more productive direction and often by providing a foundation for new discoveries.

We offer a series of illustrations. Box 3-1 provides an example of how innovation flourishes in fertile ground; Boxes 3-2 through 3-4 present examples of transformative innovations that could not have been predicted at the time of the original research; and Box 3-5 describes a failed project that unpredictably gave rise to a revolutionary idea. This concept is also illustrated in a study by the U.S. Center for Technology and National Security Policy titled The S&T Innovation Conundrum (Coffee et al., 2005, p. 1):

For example, the rapid advances in electronics and computer products over the past 50 years have created a general impression of continuous scientific breakthroughs. In reality, the breakthrough S&T innovations for electronics and computers took place in the 1940s and 1950s. The subsequent rapid advances in functional capability were the result of a brilliant and enormously successful program to exploit those early breakthroughs.

The key players in transformative breakthroughs often are well-trained researchers from diverse backgrounds who know the right people—and many of them. The right people are other talented researchers who can draw on their knowledge of diverse fields to bring fresh perspectives to stale problems. Mathematics, statistics, and computer science, for example, help advance discoveries in other scientific fields, while the social sciences provide information, incentives, and institutions that advance the use of research discoveries in all the sciences.

Once the above clues are assembled, they reveal the commonalities of most transformative innovations. Economic and other societal impacts begin with the generation of basic knowledge. Such research may be undertaken for no other reason than to satisfy curiosity. However, a broad and deep knowledge base is necessary for the development of new technologies. People and publications distribute basic scientific knowledge via networks and research institutions. Through its eventual incorpora-

BOX 3-1 Factors That Influenced the Spread of the Hybrid Corn Innovation

About 95 percent of corn now grown in the United States is hybrid corn, but this was not always the case. In the 1930s, almost no hybrid corn was grown. The father of hybrid corn, G.H. Shull, a geneticist at Cold Spring Harbor, New York, began experiments in 1906 to understand the genetics of corn. At the same time, E.M. East conducted similar experiments at Connecticut State College. Their studies provided an important basis for industry research and for research conducted at state and federally supported experiment stations and in corn research programs. Shull’s research ultimately led to one of the most significant agricultural innovations as hybrid corn went from being unknown in the 1930s to being used by more than two-thirds of all farmers by the 1940s. Allowing farmers to produce more corn with increasingly less land, the investment in this research at agricultural experiment stations yielded a return of about 40 percent (Scott et al., 2001).

Analyzing information about the spread and adoption of hybrid corn among farmers in the United States, economist Zvi Griliches teased out key factors affecting the dispersal of innovation. The challenge with large-scale commercialization of hybrid corn was the need to customize the hybrid to a particular region based on growing conditions. While simply examining the initial and ultimate spread of commercial hybrid corn provided little information, an examination of multiple factors yielded a clearer picture of the factors involved. Locations with the best growing conditions were the first to market hybrid corn. When hybrid corn reached 10 percent of the total corn grown in the United States, superior hybrids and additional farm machinery for harvesting corn allowed other farmers to achieve profit by growing it. Further movement into each state was directly linked to the capabilities of the state’s experiment station. While hybrid corn was adopted more rapidly in the north than in the south, for example, southern states with larger experiment stations, such as Florida, Louisiana, and Texas, adopted it more rapidly than other states in the region. Thus, the second major factor affecting adoption of hybrid corn was the proximity of and access to resources at state agricultural experiment stations, funded by the U.S. government. Griliches’ study demonstrates the importance of regional factors to the adoption and diffusion of novel products and concepts, as well as the importance of federal funding in overcoming regional constraints.

SOURCE: Adapted from Griliches (1957).

tion into products, processes, and business practices—most readily in geographic hubs of innovation, where research institutions are located in close proximity to an external community of funders, human intellectual capital, skilled labor, supplier networks, manufacturers, vendors, and technology-oriented lawyers and consultants (Warren et al., 2006)—this knowledge generates economic and societal benefits.

BOX 3-2 The MASER, Forerunner of the Laser

For a decade-long stretch of his career, Charles H. Townes, the inventor of laser technology, had to fight to convince others of the possibility, and the value, of the seemingly obscure technique of amplifying waves of radiation into an intense, continuous stream. During his career, he received funding from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Navy.

Townes, born in 1915 in Greenville, South Carolina, had earned his Ph.D. at the California Institute of Technology and then went to work at Bell Labs. Later, as a professor at Columbia University, he began work on generating a controlled, extended stream of microwaves through contact with an electron in an excited state. The project sounded frivolous even to his colleagues, who told him directly that they thought he was wasting the university’s money.

In 1953, Townes, James Gordon and H.J. Zeiger built the first MASER (microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation). About 5 years later, Townes and Arthur Schawlow published a paper saying the MASER’s principles could be extended to amplify radiation at the frequencies of visible light, thus introducing the principle of laser technology.

Even then, Townes encountered doubters who saw no value in the technology. Luckily, however, the scientific community began to grasp the technology’s implications. In 1960, Theodore Maiman built the first laser.

The laser became the basis of countless technologies we use in our daily lives. Without lasers, the Internet and digital media would be unimaginable. Computer hard drives, CDs, digital video and satellite broadcasting would not exist. Nor would laser eye surgery or laser treatment for cancer.

SOURCE: Reprinted with permission from Golden Goose Award (2014).

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN UNIVERSITY RESEARCH AND INDUSTRIAL INNOVATION

Universities in the United States have a long tradition of engagement with industry in research and other collaborative activities. This pattern of engagement has benefited from a two-way flow of ideas and people between academic and industrial research settings, and has included extensive patenting and licensing of university inventions to industry. Contributing to this pattern of collaboration have been both the historical structure of the national U.S. system of higher education and factors external to U.S. universities, such as relatively high levels of domestic interinstitutional mobility of researchers and new-venture financing from various private sources. But the connection between U.S. universities and innovation in industry throughout the 20th and 21st centuries has relied on a number of different channels, including, among others, the training

BOX 3-3 Green Fluorescent Protein

In 1962, an organic chemist named Osamu Shimomura, working in the Department of Biology at Princeton University, was interested in jellyfish and in learning how and why they glowed bright green under ultraviolet light. The recent Ph.D. graduate collected millions of jellyfish to isolate the source of their bioluminescence, and after many years of careful science, he finally succeeded in identifying the mechanism. He called the responsible protein “green fluorescent protein” or GFP. Beginning in the 1970s, Shimomura received funding from the National Science Foundation to explore the biochemistry of this luminescence further.

In the 1980s, Shimomura’s studies attracted the attention of a young investigator at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution named Douglas Prasher, who wanted to attach GFP to the bacterial proteins he was studying so they would glow brightly when expressed in a cell. Prasher sought $200,000 from the American Cancer Society to clone and sequence the gene for GFP. He succeeded in publishing the relatively short protein sequence, but he ran out of funding before he could actually use GFP as a tag on the bacterial proteins, and had to set the project aside. Although he failed to achieve his initial goal, Prasher did something even more valuable: he shared the cloned gene with hundreds of other scientists, including Columbia University biochemist Martin Chalfie, and University of California, San Diego biochemist Roger Tsien, who would later share the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Shimomura for their work in honing the GFP technology.

Chalfie heard about GFP at a seminar and decided to ask Prasher for the sequence so he could use GFP to tag proteins in some of the worms ( C. elegans ) he was studying, using funds from the National Institutes of Health. On the opposite side of the nation, unbeknownst to Chalfie, Tsien applied his previous research on the chemistry of florescent dyes to alter the color GFP would produce when exposed to ultraviolet light, thus allowing protein tags of many different colors to be used at once. In 1996, a scientist at the University of Oregon, Jim Remington, collaborated with Tsien to determine the crystal structure of GFP, using funds from NIH.

With this new set of tools, biomedical scientists have opened up vast new capabilities in research. The applications of GFP are ubiquitous in both basic and applied research. Shimomura did not set out to revolutionize biology or medicine; he simply wanted to understand a complex creature. Chalfie wanted to find a way to understand the neurobiochemistry of a simple model organism in more detail, and was inspired by a seminar he attended in his department. Tsien saw the potential to improve the tools available to biologists.

According to a description of the award on NobelPrize.org , the work of these researchers has made it possible today to “follow the fate of various cells with the help of GFP: nerve cell damage during Alzheimer’s disease or how insulin-producing beta cells are created in the pancreas of a growing embryo. In one spectacular experiment, researchers succeeded in tagging different nerve cells in the brain of a mouse with a kaleidoscope of colours.”

SOURCE: Adapted from NobelPrize.org (2008).

BOX 3-4 Corning ® Gorilla Glass ®

Gorilla Glass ® is in most people’s pockets, but it started with a faulty furnace and spent nearly 40 years as a shelved idea. The idea for Corning’s ultralight, ultra-thin, and virtually indestructible glass—used on the surfaces of most modern mobile phones and laptop computers—emerged one morning in 1953, when chemist S. Donald Stookey accidentally overheated a sheet of lithium silicate photosensitive glass. Because of a faulty temperature controller, the furnace Stookey was using heated the glass to 900ºC rather than 600ºC. Instead of melting, however, the glass transformed to a milky white ceramic plate and bounced, rather than breaking, when it fell to the floor. Completely by accident, Stookey had discovered a new realm of high-temperature chemistry.

This was the start of Corning’s Project Muscle—a research initiative focused on developing strengthened glass products. A key outcome was the realization that the glass could be strengthened through ion exchange by means of hot salt baths, with smaller sodium ions being traded for larger potassium ions. In 1961, Corning unveiled Chemcor glass—a highly durable ceramic that was quickly incorporated into the company’s existing product lines.

But Corning could not find a consistent market for Chemcor; it was a solution in search of a problem. Both Chemcor and Project Muscle were shelved in 1971. Chemcor did not reemerge until 2007, when the widespread use of smartphones suddenly generated the need for strong, thin, lightweight, mass-produced glass. Apple’s Steve Jobs is rumored to have rediscovered Chemcor’s properties and to have requested further improvements. Previously, Chemcor had been produced around 4mm thick, was slightly cloudy, and was manufactured only in small batches. Jobs wanted it to be 1.3mm, clear, and stretchy at relatively low temperatures. And he needed it in 6 weeks for a new idea called the iPhone.

Adam Ellison and Matt Dejneka, two of Corning’s compositional scientists, were given the task of adapting part of the Corning fusion production facility in Harrodsburg, Kentucky, to meet Apple’s first request, as well as reformulating the composition of Chemcor itself. Corning’s commitment to research—for which it is known and to which it has held true throughout its history—as well as its recognition of the sometimes delayed benefits of research, led to a product that can now be found in more than 750 commercial products and 33 brands worldwide.

SOURCE: Adapted from Gardiner (2012).

of students, faculty consulting, publication of research advances, and industry-sponsored research. These channels operate in parallel and are interdependent. Moreover, the relative importance of different channels of interaction and information flow between academic and industrial researchers appears to vary considerably among different research fields.

The so-called “Bayh-Dole era” that began in 1980 (discussed in Chapter 2 ) extended and expanded this engagement. Important as well was extensive federal support for research, notably in the life sciences, which

BOX 3-5 Failed Research That Inspired the Discovery of Novel Therapeutics: Antidepressants

In the early 1950s, researchers tested a new drug, iproniazid, for treatment of tuberculosis. It was not an effective treatment, but the researchers reported that the drug made a number of patients “inappropriately happy.” This discovery ushered in a new era of biological research on depression, leading to the development of antidepressant drugs. Iproniazid became the first marketed antidepressant.

SOURCE: Adapted from Burns (1999).

produced important advances that sparked growth in university patenting and licensing, increasingly managed directly by U.S. universities, during the 1970s. There is little evidence that increased faculty engagement in entrepreneurial activities during the post-1980 period, including the formation of new firms and patenting and licensing of inventions, negatively affected the scholarly productivity of leading researchers (Ding and Choi, 2011). Nonetheless, the efforts of U.S. universities to manage their intellectual property more directly for revenue purposes have sparked criticism from U.S. firms, especially those engaged in information technology. In response to this criticism, some U.S. universities have experimented with new approaches to the management of patenting and licensing that take into account the differences among research fields in the importance of patents relative to other vehicles for information exchange and technology transfer. Research universities can contribute to or inhibit faculty start-ups through their reward systems. Some academic departments look askance at patents in tenure consideration, while others regard patents more highly. In recent years, institutions such as the University of Maryland have begun formally counting patents and commercialization in tenure reviews (Blumenstyk, 2012). Similarly, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Ittelson and Nelsen, 2003) and Carnegie Mellon University (Simmons, 2013) have been recognized for encouraging entrepreneurship and faculty start-ups through supportive policies.

Reflecting the complex roles of university technology transfer programs in regional and U.S. national economies, an array of institutional goals can be pursued through such programs. But these goals are not always mutually consistent or compatible, so that policy priorities must be established for these programs and clearly linked to current policies. Revenue-maximizing licensing strategies may be shortsighted (Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, 2012).

Metrics for evaluating the performance of universities in transferring technology and supporting industrial innovation are informative when they are aligned with the specific goals of a given university or research institute and account for the full breadth of channels through which university research influences industrial innovation, including the training and placement of students, faculty research publications, faculty- or student-founded firms, patents, and licenses. Given the lack of data covering these various channels for most U.S. universities, as well as the need for metrics to be tailored to the goals and environments of individual universities, it appears unrealistic and unwise for federal agencies or other government evaluators to impose a single set of metrics for measuring the technology transfer performance of all U.S. universities. Trying to apply an evaluation framework that does not take adequate account of the diverse channels of university influence or the differences among universities would only serve to diminish the institutional heterogeneity that historically has been a strength of the U.S. system of higher education.

This institutional heterogeneity also implies a need for flexibility and variety in the policies used by U.S. universities to support interactions with industry and the commercialization of academic research advances. The Bayh-Dole Act and other relevant federal policies do not specify any single institutional structure for managing patenting, licensing, and related activities in university-industry collaborations. But U.S. universities have been slow to implement and evaluate different approaches to managing these activities during the three decades since the act’s passage. Such experimentation, combined with efforts to assess the effectiveness of alternative approaches, is not likely to advance to the extent that would be desirable without the encouragement of federal agencies, industry, and other stakeholders. Nonetheless, no single approach is likely to prove feasible or effective across the numerous and diverse academic institutions and private firms engaged in federally funded research and industry collaboration. Appendix B elaborates on the relationship between university research and industrial innovation.

THE UNPREDICTABLE TIMELINE FROM RESEARCH TO SOCIETAL IMPACT

In many cases, a significant time lag separates the original research from the commercialization of an innovation incorporating the knowledge generated by that research. Sometimes this time lag represents the long wait between an original research finding and its sudden and unexpected relevance to a breakthrough innovation. The basic science research that enhanced understanding of the mathematics of nonlinear control

theory, for example, eventually made it possible to create electrical power grids that rarely fail.

This time lag occurs, however, even when a research finding has readily apparent applications. This is the case because many research discoveries intended for future development and commercialization, such as the technology used to develop efficient fuels, must first cross the so-called “valley of death”—the often prohibitive cost and risk associated with proof-of-concept research. In some cases, the industry and venture capital support needed to develop a concept or invention vastly exceeds the funding for the original concept or invention.

Only after crossing this valley can the technology be incorporated into a concept model or laboratory prototype that provides a platform for the subsequent applied research and development needed for a product to compete in the marketplace. But technology concept models and laboratory prototypes must be achieved quickly, before others can exploit the discoveries on which they are based for commercial advantage. In that sense, the time lag associated with proof-of-concept research is particularly important in the race to commercialize research discoveries with immediately obvious applications.

The complexity of modern technologies has increased the difficulty of translating basic science advances into economically and socially valuable technologies. Universities, industry, and government are all investing in crossing the “valley of death” within the limitations imposed by the time lag, expense, and risk that characterize the path from basic science to the industrial laboratories where innovations are created. As discussed in Chapter 6 , government support for proof-of-concept research may be essential to overcome this barrier to the development of economically and socially viable innovations.

CONNECTING THE DOTS FROM RESEARCH TO INNOVATION

Research universities have the primary goal of generating knowledge and dispersing it through the nation’s most talented people. One of the greatest benefits of research universities is the workforce they train—their talent, abilities, knowledge, skills, and experience and the networks of professional connections they have made. Students trained in research develop critical thinking skills and an ability to help solve some of the most complex problems facing society, ranging from the technical (energy efficiency, climate change, cybersecurity) to the social (the economy, crime, an aging population, immigration).

The funding provided to research universities is therefore crucial to the societal benefits derived from the research enterprise. An example of research funding used to develop new approaches to training is the

National Science Foundation’s (NSF) 2002-2005 Department-Level Reform Grant Program, which funded 20 engineering departments to transform their undergraduate teaching from a stovepiped approach, focused solely on teaching engineering concepts, to an approach providing an education in the context of achieving societal goals. The specifics of the approaches taken by each of the departments differed, but they all included partnerships with nonengineering departments, service learning projects, and hands-on application of the concepts learned. Other interdisciplinary programs followed. The focus of these programs on theory, application, and interdisciplinary experiential education has been deemed effective, although the programs’ long-term effectiveness, including the impact on students’ careers, has not been fully evaluated (Shipp et al., 2009).

The flow of knowledge occurs when talented people forge new connections with other talented people and migrate both geographically and intellectually between positions in academia, private industry, and the government. This flow is channeled through networks and partnerships, aided by publications, citations, and other correspondence, so that bits of knowledge emerge when and where they are needed most. With the increasingly important role of the Internet in scientific research, these networks are expanding and enabling virtual collaborations. As knowledge emerges at different times and in different places, it evolves and expands. People with diverse backgrounds transform it and present it in new ways, with fresh perspectives. Networks of researchers and institutions enable discoveries, ideas, instrumentation, and analytical methods to be shared among the world’s best talent, inspiring the ultimate use of knowledge from research. These networks can also encompass scores of volunteers working with scientists on real-world research projects—a movement known as Citizen Science (Bonney et al., 2014). 1 In addition, the ready availability of knowledge enables serendipity and increases the potential for transformative innovations.

Increasingly, these flows of people and ideas occur internationally and play an important role in research and innovation in the United States. Private industry now invests in research laboratories abroad, and the findings from these laboratories feed back into U.S. research and innovation. Encouraging the mobility of researchers across national boundaries as well as among domestic research institutions remains a challenge for most nations; however, a UK Royal Society report indicates that Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States attracted the

_____________

1 Citizen Science has been defined by the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, which helped pioneer the concept, as “projects in which volunteers partner with scientists to answer real-world questions.” More information is available at: http://www.birds.cornell.edu/citscitoolkit/about/definition [June 2014].

largest numbers of highly skilled migrants 2 from OECD countries in 2001, followed by France and Germany (OECD, 2002b). China perhaps experiences the most extreme challenges with mobility (Ministry of Science and Technology of the People’s Republic of China, 2007). While it produced 1.5 million science and engineering graduates in 2006, 70 percent of the 1.06 million Chinese who studied abroad between 1978 and 2006 did not return to China ( GOV.cn , 2010). In 2008, the Chinese government established the Thousand Talents Program, which brought more than 600 overseas Chinese and foreign academics back to their native country (The Royal Society, 2011).

Today, knowledge from basic science moves more rapidly than ever across international borders, and research findings can be shared in a public forum (e.g., the GenBank database of genetic and proteomic findings) to become immediately accessible to all researchers worldwide. A study by Griffith and colleagues (2004) suggests that foreign research and development can spill over domestically and have an impact on productivity. As discussed in greater detail in Chapter 6 , the United States needs to educate and attract the scientists and engineers who understand and can advance these findings by conducting world-class basic research in all major areas of science, with “major areas” being defined as broad disciplines of science, their major subdisciplines, and emerging areas such as nanotechnology (National Academy of Sciences, 1993).

This requirement is emphasized in a 1993 report of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), Science, Technology, and the Federal Government: National Goals for a New Era , which emphasizes the importance of the United States being among the leaders in all major areas of science (National Academy of Sciences, 1993). In particular, the report is noted for its argument that maintaining a world-class standard of excellence in all fields will help ensure that the United States can “apply and extend scientific advances quickly no matter when or where in the world they occur” ( Experiments in International Benchmarking of U.S. Research Fields [National Academy of Sciences, 2000, p. 5], in reference to the 1993 NAS report). To this end, the federal investment must be vigorous enough to support research across the entire spectrum of scientific and technological investigation. Because of the interconnection among fields, neglect of one field such that the capabilities and infrastructure in that field are exceeded elsewhere could impede domestic progress in other fields or stifle innovation. The importance of nurturing all fields of scientific research to foster transformative innovations is illustrated by the case study in Box 3-6 .

2 Highly skilled migrants are defined by OECD as workers who have completed education at the third level in a science and technology (S&T) field of study, or who are employed in an S&T occupation in which that level of education is typically required.

BOX 3-6 Genomics and the Big Bang Theory

In 2001, three astrophysicists published in Science a confirmation of the Big Bang theory of the creation of the universe (Miller et al., 2001a, 2001b). They studied the imprint of so-called acoustic oscillations on the distribution of matter in the universe and showed it to be in concordance with the distribution of cosmic microwave background radiation from the early universe. This discovery not only provided support for the Big Bang theory but also yielded an understanding of the physics of the early universe that enabled predictions of the distribution of matter from the microwave background radiation forward and backward in time.

The discovery was made using a statistical method—the false-discovery rate—to detect the oscillations. The impetus for this method was the development of technologies that allowed for the rapid collection and analysis of data on a large number of distinct factors.

Collaborating with the astrophysicists, a statistician developed the method further for their research. Using this method, the authors were able to make their discovery and publish it in Science while others were still wrestling with the plethora of data. Based on the method’s applications to cosmology, statisticians conducted research to improve it, and it is now used in many other applications. This method has been applied in genomics, for example, so that for a small sample of individuals, thousands of genes can be tested simultaneously to determine how they differ in affecting a biological condition.

The possibility of innovation is enhanced when tools and resources considered “missing” in some fields of science can be handed over by colleagues in other fields at the precise moment that they matter most (see Box 2-5 in Chapter 2 ). When investments in research create a fertile environment for innovation, the United States has a greater capacity to build scientific infrastructure, generate knowledge and human capital, and reap economic and other societal benefits. When the environment is fertile for innovation, the nation is better prepared for an uncertain future.

A wise investment in America’s future, therefore, is an investment in knowledge : in the researchers who generate it, in the research colleges and universities that disseminate it, and in the networks of scientists and engineers who transform and ultimately use it . The value of knowledge becomes most evident through its eventual applications, which often cannot be predicted. Nonetheless, investing in the generation, dissemination, and use of knowledge will better ensure that research leads to applications that benefit society, some in transformative ways. Many research findings will eventually have unexpected applications that differ from a project’s original goal. The task for government management of research is not to predict, much less control, the future but to allow discoveries to emerge from these investments.

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Scientific research has enabled America to remain at the forefront of global competition for commercially viable technologies and other innovations. For more than 65 years, the United States has led the world in science and technology. Discoveries from scientific research have extended our understanding of the physical and natural world, the cosmos, society, and of humans - their minds, bodies, and economic and other social interactions. Through these discoveries, science has enabled longer and healthier lives, provided for a better-educated citizenry, enhanced the national economy, and strengthened America's position in the global economy. At a time of budget stringency, how can we foster scientific innovation to ensure America's unprecedented prosperity, security, and quality of life?

Although many studies have investigated the impacts of research on society, Furthering America's Research Enterprise brings to bear a fresh approach informed by a more holistic understanding of the research enterprise as a complex, dynamic system. This understanding illuminates why America's research enterprise has historically been so successful; where attention should be focused to increase the societal benefits of research investments; and how those who make decisions on the allocation of funds for scientific research can best carry out their task.

This report will be of special interest to policy makers who support or manage the research enterprise, to others in public and private institutions who fund research, to scholars of the research enterprise, and to scientists and engineers who seek to better understand the many pathways through which their research benefits society.

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Nature’s own chemistry could help reduce waste and improve health

When Dr Andrés de la Escosura, an organic chemistry researcher at the Institute for Advanced Research in Chemical Sciences (IAdChem) in Madrid, Spain, set out to fundamentally change the way that we produce the chemicals used in everyday life, his rationale was simple. Chemistry in nature is clean and efficient, whilst industrial chemistry is anything but. 

‘Chemical reactions in nature are incredibly efficient, generating very little waste and consuming very little energy,’ said de la Escosura.

He wondered whether, by mimicking biology more closely in industrial reactions, we could create a cleaner, more environment-friendly chemical industry.

Thanks to funding from the EU, de la Escosura was able to join forces with researchers from countries such as Austria, the Netherlands and Switzerland to put these ideas to the test in a research initiative called  CLASSY that ended earlier this year.

Natural advantage

Living organisms function using biochemical reactions. Everything, from respiration and photosynthesis through to the digestion of food and the contraction of muscles, involves the movement, breakdown, recombination and synthesis of chemicals. These processes are all very clean and energy efficient.

On the other hand, today’s industrial chemical industry that is used to power sectors such as health, energy, transport and housing creates vast amounts of waste. The production of pharmaceuticals, for instance, typically generates 25 to 100 kilograms of waste for every kilogram of final product. 

“ Chemical reactions in nature are incredibly efficient, generating very little waste and consuming very little energy. Dr Andrés de la Escosura, CLASSY

The chemical industry is also very energy intensive. The EU’s statistical office reported that the chemical and petrochemical sector is responsible for  one-fifth of Europe’s industrial energy consumption. This makes it a major polluter and contributor to climate change.

The CLASSY researchers turned to living systems for inspiration. Nature efficiently synthesises an enormous variety of complex chemical products by separating, or compartmentalising, different chemical processes and using natural feedback mechanisms to regulate them.

Continuous flow

The research team explored ways to replicate these processes in what they call “microfluidic reactors” set up to mimic the activity of living cells.

Microfluidics is the manipulation of fluids through tiny channels. Fluids, and the molecules within them, are sorted and guided through a series of chips or microreactors. Different molecules can be sent to different reaction chambers, and their progress through the device is closely controlled in a step-by-step progressive process. 

The processing of synthetic chemicals requires several different steps. When you carry out these processes in a closed system, like a flask or industrial reaction chamber, at some point you need to stop, empty the reactor and then start the reaction again, explained de la Escosura.

Microfluidics enables chemical reactions to occur in a more natural fashion. The reactors contain a mix of enzymes and other molecules that produce a chemical reaction. When one chemical reaction finishes, the compounds flow through the system to the next chamber and the next reaction. The benefit of this is that the overall process can run continuously.

The CLASSY researchers have made good progress with these reactors, successfully creating a microfluidic device that breaks down vegetable fats to produce a biofuel to prove their concept. 

De la Escosura acknowledges that the efficiency of the process could be further improved, but the hope is that, in the future, such devices could complete different tasks depending on what is fed into the system. More basic research is needed, he said, but the hope is that this approach could dramatically reduce waste and energy consumption, while improving chemical yields.

‘The goal is to minimise the impact that the chemical industry has on climate change and other environmental issues,’ he said.

This is particularly important as global chemical production is expected to  double by 2030 , according to the EU, which published its own chemicals strategy in 2020 aimed at reducing the environmental and health impact of the chemicals sector as part of the EU’s zero pollution goals and the  European Green Deal . 

Body chemistry

On a similar path of investigation, researchers from Spain, Denmark, the Netherlands and Switzerland are exploring how complex chemical reaction networks (CRNs) created using microfluidic chips could help regulate the processes in our bodies. 

This is part of a 4-year research initiative called  CORENET , also coordinated by de la Escosura, that received funding from the EU to design “chemical computers” able to interact with the human body.

This isn’t as outlandish as it might sound. ‘The most efficient computer in the world is chemical – the human brain,’ said de la Escosura. In fact, all our organs, which monitor conditions in our body and produce corresponding outputs, are basically information processors.

“ The most efficient computer in the world is chemical – the human brain. Dr Andrés de la Escosura, CORENET

‘Biological systems do all they do – the functions, the information processing, everything – with molecules,’ said de la Escosura.

A potential advantage of chemical computers is that they could produce information in the form of chemicals that can interact directly with living systems – and respond to input received from them. This could be used to produce wearable medical devices that are able to mimic natural biochemical signalling. 

Seamless communication

Most wearable medical devices are still fairly simple. Insulin pumps, for instance, deliver a regular dose of insulin at steady intervals throughout the day to help control blood sugar levels in people with diabetes. 

Some more advanced devices being developed can respond directly to blood sugar levels to deliver insulin when needed, and may even be able to offer some dose control.

A wearable chemical computer able to measure the chemical compounds in the blood and, through a series of reactions, produce different chemicals in response would be a real game changer. 

‘This type of computing with chemical systems may help us to better model the complexity that we find in biological organisms,’ said de la Escosura.

Although such devices are still a long way off, CORENET researchers believe that they could one day offer personalised treatment for various conditions through the synthesis of drug molecules triggered by cues from the body. They could even be used to create advanced brain–machine interfaces.

For Katja-Sophia Csizi, a postdoctoral researcher at IBM Research in Zurich, Switzerland, the work being done in CORENET is extremely innovative because it thinks of chemistry from a completely different perspective. Csizi’s work in the team focuses on how to use CRNs in chemical computing applications.

‘It is easier and far more effective to reach an ambitious goal if you approach it from different perspectives,’ she said.

Research in this article was funded by the EU’s Horizon Programme including, in the case of CORENET, via the European Innovation Council (EIC). The views of the interviewees don’t necessarily reflect those of the European Commission. If you liked this article, please consider sharing it on social media.

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The eight essentials of innovation

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January 4, 2024

In the time since this article was first published, McKinsey has continued to explore the topics it covers. Read on for a summary of our latest insights.

Innovation may sound like a creative art: hard to quantify, dependent on lightning-bolt inspiration, subject to the availability of magic dust and luck. It’s true that innovation relies, to an extent, on the vagaries of ingenuity. But according to McKinsey research, innovation—and, crucially, the type of outperformance that innovation can spark in organizations—is much more likely to happen when there is a rigorous process  in place to bring ideas to fruition.

The simple fact is that innovation translates to growth : innovation leaders generate almost twice as much revenue growth from innovation as their competitors. Our research in the years since the COVID-19 pandemic has found that these organizations, which we call “innovative growers,” do this by cultivating four best practices :

• Link innovation to growth aspirations and reinforce its importance in strategic and financial discussions.
• Pursue multiple pathways to growth, both in core businesses and when entering adjacent customer segments, industries, or geographies. Innovative growers also only enter markets where there are clear opportunities to create value.
• Invest productively in all innovation capabilities, including research and development, resourcing, and operational agility.
• Cultivate strong M&A capabilities, particularly programmatic dealmaking.

Innovation can be especially rewarding when deployed as a crisis-management measure . During periods of uncertainty, organizations that invest in innovation—contrary, perhaps, to the impulse to batten down the hatches—are also more likely to emerge ahead of competitors. More specifically, innovative organizations are more likely to find emerging pockets of growth  in times of uncertainty.

Looking ahead, we expect innovative organizations to keep outpacing their peers. Our 2023 McKinsey Global Survey  reveals a striking connection  between organizations’ innovation capabilities and their abilities to increase value through the newest digital technologies, including generative AI. Everyone is talking about gen AI, but organizations with strong innovative cultures are walking the walk, too: thirty percent of top innovators we surveyed said they are already deploying gen AI at scale in their innovation and R&D functions, more than six times the rate of companies that are lagging on innovation. Top innovators are also already reaping significantly better business outcomes from their AI investments than slower-moving competitors.

Articles referenced:

• “ Companies with innovative cultures have a big edge with generative AI ,” August 2023
• “ Innovation: Your solution for weathering uncertainty ,” January 2023
• “ Committed innovators: How masters of essentials outperform ,” June 2022
• “ Innovation in a crisis: Why it is more critical than ever ,” June 2020

It’s no secret: innovation is difficult for well-established companies. By and large, they are better executors than innovators, and most succeed less through game-changing creativity than by optimizing their existing businesses.

Yet hard as it is for such organizations to innovate, large ones as diverse as Alcoa, the Discovery Group, and NASA’s Ames Research Center are actually doing so. What can other companies learn from their approaches and attributes? That question formed the core of a multiyear study comprising in-depth interviews, workshops, and surveys of more than 2,500 executives in over 300 companies, including both performance leaders and laggards, in a broad set of industries and countries (Exhibit 1). What we found were a set of eight essential attributes that are present, either in part or in full, at every big company that’s a high performer in product, process, or business-model innovation.

Since innovation is a complex, company-wide endeavor , it requires a set of crosscutting practices and processes to structure, organize, and encourage it. Taken together, the essentials described in this article constitute just such an operating system, as seen in Exhibit 2. These often overlapping, iterative, and nonsequential practices resist systematic categorization but can nonetheless be thought of in two groups. The first four, which are strategic and creative in nature, help set and prioritize the terms and conditions under which innovation is more likely to thrive. The next four essentials deal with how to deliver and organize for innovation repeatedly over time and with enough value to contribute meaningfully to overall performance.

To be sure, there’s no proven formula for success, particularly when it comes to innovation. While our years of client-service experience provide strong indicators for the existence of a causal relationship between the attributes that survey respondents reported and the innovations of the companies we studied, the statistics described here can only prove correlation. Yet we firmly believe that if companies assimilate and apply these essentials—in their own way, in accordance with their particular context, capabilities, organizational culture, and appetite for risk—they will improve the likelihood that they, too, can rekindle the lost spark of innovation. In the digital age, the pace of change has gone into hyperspeed, so companies must get these strategic, creative, executional, and organizational factors right to innovate successfully.

President John F. Kennedy’s bold aspiration, in 1962, to “go to the moon in this decade” motivated a nation to unprecedented levels of innovation. A far-reaching vision can be a compelling catalyst, provided it’s realistic enough to stimulate action today.

But in a corporate setting, as many CEOs have discovered, even the most inspiring words often are insufficient, no matter how many times they are repeated. It helps to combine high-level aspirations with estimates of the value that innovation should generate to meet financial-growth objectives. Quantifying an “innovation target for growth,” and making it an explicit part of future strategic plans, helps solidify the importance of and accountability for innovation. The target itself must be large enough to force managers to include innovation investments in their business plans. If they can make their numbers using other, less risky tactics, our experience suggests that they (quite rationally) will.

Establishing a quantitative innovation aspiration is not enough, however. The target value needs to be apportioned to relevant business “owners” and cascaded down to their organizations in the form of performance targets and timelines. Anything less risks encouraging inaction or the belief that innovation is someone else’s job.

For example, Lantmännen, a big Nordic agricultural cooperative, was challenged by flat organic growth and directionless innovation. Top executives created an aspirational vision and strategic plan linked to financial targets: 6 percent growth in the core business and 2 percent growth in new organic ventures. To encourage innovation projects, these quantitative targets were cascaded down to business units and, ultimately, to product groups. During the development of each innovation project, it had to show how it was helping to achieve the growth targets for its category and markets. As a result, Lantmännen went from 4 percent to 13 percent annual growth, underpinned by the successful launch of several new brands. Indeed, it became the market leader in premade food only four years after entry and created a new premium segment in this market.

Such performance parameters can seem painful to managers more accustomed to the traditional approach. In our experience, though, CEOs are likely just going through the motions if they don’t use evaluations and remuneration to assess and recognize the contribution that all top managers make to innovation.

Fresh, creative insights are invaluable, but in our experience many companies run into difficulty less from a scarcity of new ideas than from the struggle to determine which ideas to support and scale. At bigger companies, this can be particularly problematic during market discontinuities, when supporting the next wave of growth may seem too risky, at least until competitive dynamics force painful changes.

Innovation is inherently risky, to be sure, and getting the most from a portfolio of innovation initiatives is more about managing risk than eliminating it. Since no one knows exactly where valuable innovations will emerge, and searching everywhere is impractical, executives must create some boundary conditions for the opportunity spaces they want to explore. The process of identifying and bounding these spaces can run the gamut from intuitive visions of the future to carefully scrutinized strategic analyses. Thoughtfully prioritizing these spaces also allows companies to assess whether they have enough investment behind their most valuable opportunities.

During this process, companies should set in motion more projects than they will ultimately be able to finance, which makes it easier to kill those that prove less promising. RELX Group, for example, runs 10 to 15 experiments per major customer segment, each funded with a preliminary budget of around $200,000, through its innovation pipeline every year, choosing subsequently to invest more significant funds in one or two of them, and dropping the rest. “One of the hardest things to figure out is when to kill something,” says Kumsal Bayazit, RELX Group’s chief strategy officer. “It’s a heck of a lot easier if you have a portfolio of ideas.”

Once the opportunities are defined, companies need transparency into what people are working on and a governance process that constantly assesses not only the expected value, timing, and risk of the initiatives in the portfolio but also its overall composition. There’s no single mix that’s universally right. Most established companies err on the side of overloading their innovation pipelines with relatively safe, short-term, and incremental projects that have little chance of realizing their growth targets or staying within their risk parameters. Some spread themselves thinly across too many projects instead of focusing on those with the highest potential for success and resourcing them to win.

These tendencies get reinforced by a sluggish resource-reallocation process. Our research shows that a company typically reallocates only a tiny fraction of its resources from year to year, thereby sentencing innovation to a stagnating march of incrementalism. 1 1. See Stephen Hall, Dan Lovallo, and Reinier Musters, “ How to put your money where your strategy is ,” McKinsey Quarterly , March 2012; and Vanessa Chan, Marc de Jong, and Vidyadhar Ranade, “ Finding the sweet spot for allocating innovation resources ,” McKinsey Quarterly , May 2014.

Innovation also requires actionable and differentiated insights—the kind that excite customers and bring new categories and markets into being. How do companies develop them? Genius is always an appealing approach, if you have or can get it. Fortunately, innovation yields to other approaches besides exceptional creativity.

The rest of us can look for insights by methodically and systematically scrutinizing three areas: a valuable problem to solve, a technology that enables a solution, and a business model that generates money from it. You could argue that nearly every successful innovation occurs at the intersection of these three elements. Companies that effectively collect, synthesize, and “collide” them stand the highest probability of success. “If you get the sweet spot of what the customer is struggling with, and at the same time get a deeper knowledge of the new technologies coming along and find a mechanism for how these two things can come together, then you are going to get good returns,” says Alcoa chairman and chief executive Klaus Kleinfeld.

The insight-discovery process, which extends beyond a company’s boundaries to include insight-generating partnerships, is the lifeblood of innovation. We won’t belabor the matter here, though, because it’s already the subject of countless articles and books. 2 2. See, for example, Marla M. Capozzi, Reneé Dye, and Amy Howe, “ Sparking creativity in teams: An executive’s guide ,” McKinsey Quarterly , April 2011; and Marla M. Capozzi, John Horn, and Ari Kellen, “ Battle-test your innovation strategy ,” McKinsey Quarterly , December 2012. One thing we can add is that discovery is iterative, and the active use of prototypes can help companies continue to learn as they develop, test, validate, and refine their innovations. Moreover, we firmly believe that without a fully developed innovation system encompassing the other elements described in this article, large organizations probably won’t innovate successfully, no matter how effective their insight-generation process is. 

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Business-model innovations—which change the economics of the value chain, diversify profit streams, and/or modify delivery models—have always been a vital part of a strong innovation portfolio. As smartphones and mobile apps threaten to upend oldline industries, business-model innovation has become all the more urgent: established companies must reinvent their businesses before technology-driven upstarts do. Why, then, do most innovation systems so squarely emphasize new products? The reason, of course, is that most big companies are reluctant to risk tampering with their core business model until it’s visibly under threat. At that point, they can only hope it’s not too late.

Leading companies combat this troubling tendency in a number of ways. They up their game in market intelligence, the better to separate signal from noise. They establish funding vehicles for new businesses that don’t fit into the current structure. They constantly reevaluate their position in the value chain, carefully considering business models that might deliver value to priority groups of new customers. They sponsor pilot projects and experiments away from the core business to help combat narrow conceptions of what they are and do. And they stress-test newly emerging value propositions and operating models against countermoves by competitors.

Amazon does a particularly strong job extending itself into new business models by addressing the emerging needs of its customers and suppliers. In fact, it has included many of its suppliers in its customer base by offering them an increasingly wide range of services, from hosted computing to warehouse management. Another strong performer, the Financial Times , was already experimenting with its business model in response to the increasing digitalization of media when, in 2007, it launched an innovative subscription model, upending its relationship with advertisers and readers. “We went against the received wisdom of popular strategies at the time,” says Caspar de Bono, FT board member and managing director of B2B. “We were very deliberate in getting ahead of the emerging structural change, and the decisions turned out to be very successful.” In print’s heyday, 80 percent of the FT ’s revenue came from print advertising. Now, more than half of it comes from content, and two-thirds of circulation comes from digital subscriptions.

Virulent antibodies undermine innovation at many large companies. Cautious governance processes make it easy for stifling bureaucracies in marketing, legal, IT, and other functions to find reasons to halt or slow approvals. Too often, companies simply get in the way of their own attempts to innovate. A surprising number of impressive innovations from companies were actually the fruit of their mavericks, who succeeded in bypassing their early-approval processes. Clearly, there’s a balance to be maintained: bureaucracy must be held in check, yet the rush to market should not undermine the cross-functional collaboration, continuous learning cycles, and clear decision pathways that help enable innovation. Are managers with the right knowledge, skills, and experience making the crucial decisions in a timely manner, so that innovation continually moves through an organization in a way that creates and maintains competitive advantage, without exposing a company to unnecessary risk?

Companies also thrive by testing their promising ideas with customers early in the process, before internal forces impose modifications that blur the original value proposition. To end up with the innovation initially envisioned, it’s necessary to knock down the barriers  that stand between a great idea and the end user. Companies need a well-connected manager to take charge of a project and be responsible for the budget, time to market, and key specifications—a person who can say yes rather than no. In addition, the project team needs to be cross-functional in reality, not just on paper. This means locating its members in a single place and ensuring that they give the project a significant amount of their time (at least half) to support a culture that puts the innovation project’s success above the success of each function.

Cross-functional collaboration can help ensure end-user involvement throughout the development process. At many companies, marketing’s role is to champion the interests of end users as development teams evolve products and to help ensure that the final result is what everyone first envisioned. But this responsibility is honored more often in the breach than in the observance. Other companies, meanwhile, rationalize that consumers don’t necessarily know what they want until it becomes available. This may be true, but customers can certainly say what they don’t like. And the more quickly and frequently a project team gets—and uses—feedback, the more quickly it gets a great end result.

Some ideas, such as luxury goods and many smartphone apps, are destined for niche markets. Others, like social networks, work at global scale. Explicitly considering the appropriate magnitude and reach of a given idea is important to ensuring that the right resources and risks are involved in pursuing it. The seemingly safer option of scaling up over time can be a death sentence. Resources and capabilities must be marshaled to make sure a new product or service can be delivered quickly at the desired volume and quality. Manufacturing facilities, suppliers, distributors, and others must be prepared to execute a rapid and full rollout.

For example, when TomTom launched its first touch-screen navigational device, in 2004, the product flew off the shelves. By 2006, TomTom’s line of portable navigation devices reached sales of about 5 million units a year, and by 2008, yearly volume had jumped to more than 12 million. “That’s faster market penetration than mobile phones” had, says Harold Goddijn, TomTom’s CEO and cofounder. While TomTom’s initial accomplishment lay in combining a well-defined consumer problem with widely available technology components, rapid scaling was vital to the product’s continuing success. “We doubled down on managing our cash, our operations, maintaining quality, all the parts of the iceberg no one sees,” Goddijn adds. “We were hugely well organized.”

In the space of only a few years, companies in nearly every sector have conceded that innovation requires external collaborators. Flows of talent and knowledge increasingly transcend company and geographic boundaries. Successful innovators achieve significant multiples for every dollar invested in innovation by accessing the skills and talents of others. In this way, they speed up innovation and uncover new ways to create value for their customers and ecosystem partners.

Smart collaboration with external partners, though, goes beyond merely sourcing new ideas and insights; it can involve sharing costs and finding faster routes to market. Famously, the components of Apple’s first iPod were developed almost entirely outside the company; by efficiently managing these external partnerships, Apple was able to move from initial concept to marketable product in only nine months. NASA’s Ames Research Center teams up not just with international partners—launching joint satellites with nations as diverse as Lithuania, Saudi Arabia, and Sweden—but also with emerging companies, such as SpaceX.

High-performing innovators work hard to develop the ecosystems that help deliver these benefits. Indeed, they strive to become partners of choice, increasing the likelihood that the best ideas and people will come their way. That requires a systematic approach. First, these companies find out which partners they are already working with; surprisingly few companies know this. Then they decide which networks—say, four or five of them—they ideally need to support their innovation strategies. This step helps them to narrow and focus their collaboration efforts and to manage the flow of possibilities from outside the company. Strong innovators also regularly review their networks, extending and pruning them as appropriate and using sophisticated incentives and contractual structures to motivate high-performing business partners. Becoming a true partner of choice is, among other things, about clarifying what a partnership can offer the junior member: brand, reach, or access, perhaps. It is also about behavior. Partners of choice are fair and transparent in their dealings.

Moreover, companies that make the most of external networks have a good idea of what’s most useful at which stages of the innovation process. In general, they cast a relatively wide net in the early going. But as they come closer to commercializing a new product or service, they become narrower and more specific in their sourcing, since by then the new offering’s design is relatively set.

How do leading companies stimulate, encourage, support, and reward innovative behavior and thinking among the right groups of people? The best companies find ways to embed innovation into the fibers of their culture, from the core to the periphery.

They start back where we began: with aspirations that forge tight connections among innovation, strategy, and performance. When a company sets financial targets for innovation and defines market spaces, minds become far more focused. As those aspirations come to life through individual projects across the company, innovation leaders clarify responsibilities using the appropriate incentives and rewards.

The Discovery Group, for example, is upending the medical and life-insurance industries in its native South Africa and also has operations in the United Kingdom, the United States, and China, among other locations. Innovation is a standard measure in the company’s semiannual divisional scorecards—a process that helps mobilize the organization and affects roughly 1,000 of the company’s business leaders. “They are all required to innovate every year,” Discovery founder and CEO Adrian Gore says of the company’s business leaders. “They have no choice.”

Organizational changes may be necessary, not because structural silver bullets exist—we’ve looked hard for them and don’t think they do—but rather to promote collaboration, learning, and experimentation. Companies must help people to share ideas and knowledge freely, perhaps by locating teams working on different types of innovation in the same place, reviewing the structure of project teams to make sure they always have new blood, ensuring that lessons learned from success and failure are captured and assimilated, and recognizing innovation efforts even when they fall short of success.

Internal collaboration and experimentation can take years to establish, particularly in large, mature companies with strong cultures and ways of working that, in other respects, may have served them well. Some companies set up “innovation garages” where small groups can work on important projects unconstrained by the normal working environment while building new ways of working that can be scaled up and absorbed into the larger organization. NASA, for example, has ten field centers. But the space agency relies on the Ames Research Center, in Silicon Valley, to maintain what its former director, Dr. Pete Worden, calls “the character of rebels” to function as “a laboratory that’s part of a much larger organization.”

Big companies do not easily reinvent themselves as leading innovators. Too many fixed routines and cultural factors can get in the way. For those that do make the attempt, innovation excellence is often built in a multiyear effort that touches most, if not all, parts of the organization. Our experience and research suggest that any company looking to make this journey will maximize its probability of success by closely studying and appropriately assimilating the leading practices of high-performing innovators. Taken together, these form an essential operating system for innovation within a company’s organizational structure and culture.

Marc de Jong is a principal in McKinsey’s Amsterdam office, Nathan Marston is a principal in the London office, and Erik Roth is a principal in the Shanghai office.

The authors wish to thank Jill Hellman and McKinsey’s Peet van Biljon for their contributions to this article.

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Innovation Research Topics: That You Need To Look Into

Whenever you want to come up with a professional or academic paper that stands out, one of the best ways is to think of various innovative ideas. But coming up with ideas like argumentative essay topics or dissertation proposal help that allow you to exploit the issue perfectly and reveal some fantastic findings isn’t always easy.

Best Project Innovation Ideas in Management

Interesting innovation technology ideas, hot innovation project ideas for students, most captivating innovation project ideas in healthcare, easy innovative business topics for research paper, trendy innovation research topics, simple innovation essay topics in education, top innovative research topics on social media, fascinating product innovation ideas, awesome innovative research ideas in agriculture.

In your innovation research, focus on your interests based on what you learn in your course. That’s the best way to have a topic you can effectively write and excite your professor or sponsor. This article will focus on 100 innovative research topics you can consider to improve your chances of scoring a top grade.

In addition to social media research topics , there’s a lot you can focus on to write excellent projects. Here are some of the management innovation research examples to get you started.

• Management innovations as a critical factor in increasing consumers
• Disruptive innovations in management nobody expected this year
• Comparing the internal and external management innovations
• A look at innovations in business management post-COVID-19
• The needed innovations in manufacturing companies to improve waste management
• Exploring the impact of customer relationship management tools in 2023
• How digital transformation has changed management processes in big ventures
• How innovations are transforming the risk management space
• Evaluating the effectiveness of virtual management tools
• The role of machine learning in project management

A topic that allows you to write about what the majority like most will make you stand out. As you read more on social issues research topics , the innovative technology ideas below are also worth it.

• Analyzing the innovations in the airline industries over the years
• The role of technology innovations in the crime sector
• Are digital technologies losing the sense of innovativeness?
• Innovations in technology and service delivery: The truth revealed
• Understanding how tech innovations cause job losses
• Effects of technological changes on the payment processes
• Machine learning algorithms in maintaining production systems
• Analyzing how smart homes are becoming better with artificial intelligence
• Is the continuous development of apps with blockchain technology viable?
• Understanding the security of mobile apps from a technological perspective

Every student desires a project showing their detailed understanding of the innovation idea. Besides these research topics for STEM students , here are some hot product innovation examples for students:

• AI as a solution for mild illnesses
• Comparing tech innovations based on project budgets
• The impacts of blockchain technology in developing voting systems
• The role of AI in surveillance systems
• Part of the innovations in energy generation using renewable sources
• Part of the innovations in traffic control
• Online shopping innovations transforming the retail sector
• How innovations are making it easy to handle cycle crimes
• Developing a health and wellness app for students with bad eating habits
• Using waste materials to build tech machines and hardware

A common question about innovation in healthcare is, how do people come up with many exciting biochemistry topics that are out there in published papers? Worry not because this section will reveal more diverse ideas to try out.

• Analyzing the usage of health and fitness apps among the elderly
• Using electronic health data in apps development
• Improving hospital drug dispensation with automation
• Tracking blood electrolyte levels without sample collection
• Challenges of using automation to diagnose infants
• Blockchain as key in health records
• Expected innovations in telemedicine going forward
• How technology has changed hospital consultations
• Blood pressure interventions using the latest technologies
• Are innovations that track patient progress online practical?

From the many innovation project examples you’ll come across in your research, innovative business topics are among the most exciting to read. Read on for more exciting topics.

• Challenges of innovations in business
• Innovation and passive income
• Online stores’ key growth parameters
• Using technology to get legit business advice
• Artificial intelligence in business data management
• Innovation ideas for manufacturing business
• Encouraging innovations to increase product consumption
• Innovations in businesses are capital intensive
• A new era of hiring and staffing
• Role of management in business innovations

Economics research paper topics tell a lot about the current times. However, a trendy example of an innovation research topic expounds more on what many now prefer. These sample innovation topics show what’s trending.

• The benefits of quantum computing
• Automation in customer management
• A look at predictive analysis
• Using the Internet of Things Correctly
• Database improvement with blockchain
• New cybersecurity interventions
• 5G revolution
• Using edge computing in research
• A look at machine learning advancements
• Artificial intelligence vs. machine learning

Education innovation and changes attract a lot of controversies. Here are some essay topics in education you’ll be happy to focus on.

• The impact of outside-class learning
• Brain breaks in the academic journey
• Early learning trauma and academic excellence
• Virtual vs. physical presence learning
• Grades and student improvement
• Mastery-based grading
• Personalize learning curriculum
• Role of tech in homeschooling
• Role of STEM in education innovations
• Benefits of blended learning

First, read more about the thesis statement about social media . You’ll realize it’s pretty easy to create some fantastic research topics. These innovation samples revolve around social media.

• Social media and brands authenticity
• Social media and propaganda
• Addressing costs of social media advertising
• Social media content challenges
• Why prioritize social media integrations?
• Are cookies making social media sites worse?
• Comparing Facebook and Instagram ads
• A look at crucial TikTok analytics
• Comparing short and long-form social media content
• A new approach to social media ads

As you learn more about anatomy research papers , we’d love to emphasize more on research product ideas that apply to other fields. These ideas include the following:

• E-learning short courses taking over major courses
• Adaptation of drones in fighting crimes
• New car accessories and improved efficiency
• Candle innovations that sell
• Technological advancements in Cannabis processing
• Food products for intolerant kids
• Baby products now save costs
• Tech in safe training machines
• Humidifiers and COVID-19
• Kitchen air fryers and their health concern

You probably have many questions about innovation, especially in the agriculture sector. We will list some innovative topics below to help you write the best research paper.

• A detailed overview of automated farm machines
• Are laser scarecrows effective?
• On-site agriculture product testing
• Innovations for improving harvest quality
• Using IoT technology to conserve water
• Mobile apps in agriculture
• Role of tech in animal feeding
• Current innovations in farm management
• Use of AI in agricultural innovations
• Using innovations to increase crop yields

How does research make human innovation possible? If you have been wondering about this question, the topics listed in this article will give you the best answer. Once you have decided on what you want to focus on, reach out to us, and let’s help you write a research paper that guarantees a top grade.

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Energy Innovation Hub teams will emphasize multi-disciplinary fundamental research to address long-standing and emerging challenges for rechargeable batteries

WASHINGTON, D.C . - Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $125 million in funding for two Energy Innovation Hub teams to provide the scientific foundation needed to seed and accelerate next generation technologies beyond today’s generation of lithium (Li)-ion batteries. These multi-institution research teams, led by Argonne National Laboratory and Stanford University, will develop scientific concepts and understanding to impact decarbonization of transportation and incorporation of clean energy into the electricity grid.

Rechargeable batteries, such as Li-ion and lead-acid batteries, have had a tremendous impact on the nation’s economy. Emerging applications will require even greater energy storage capabilities, safer operation, lower costs, and diversity of materials to manufacture batteries. Meeting these challenges requires a better understanding of foundational battery and materials sciences to enable scalable battery designs with versatile and reversible energy storage capabilities beyond what is currently possible. Additional benefits may include mitigation of supply chain risks associated with the current generation of batteries.

"Providing the scientific foundation to accelerate this important research is key to our economy and making sure the U.S. plays a lead role in transforming the way we store and use electricity,” said Harriet Kung, DOE’s Acting Director for the Office of Science. “Today's awards provide our Energy Innovation Hub teams with the tools and resources to solve some of the most challenging science problems that are limiting our ability to decarbonize transportation and incorporate clean energy into the electricity grid."

The two Energy Innovation Hub teams are the Energy Storage Research Alliance (ESRA) led by Argonne National Laboratory and the Aqueous Battery Consortium (ABC) led by Stanford University. ESRA will provide the scientific underpinning to develop new compact batteries for heavy-duty transportation and energy storage solutions for the grid with a focus on achieving unprecedented molecular-level control of chemical reactivity, ion selectivity, and directional transport in complex electrochemical cells. ABC will focus on establishing the scientific foundation for large-scale development and deployment of aqueous batteries for long-duration grid storage technologies.  Both of these teams will prioritize study and use of Earth-abundant materials to mitigate supply chain risks.

Both Energy Innovation Hubs teams are comprised of multiple institutions, including Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and other Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs). The projects provide an outstanding opportunity for workforce development in energy storage research and inclusive research involving diverse individuals from diverse institutions. 

The teams were selected by competitive peer review under the DOE Funding Opportunity Announcement for the Energy Innovation Hub Program: Research to Enable Next-Generation Batteries and Energy Storage. While focused on basic science, the Funding Opportunity Announcement was developed in coordination through the DOE Joint Strategy Team for Batteries.

Total funding is $125 million for awards lasting up to five years in duration. More information can be found on the Basic Energy Sciences program  homepage and  Energy Innovation Hubs page.

Selection for award negotiations is not a commitment by DOE to issue an award or provide funding. Before funding is issued, DOE and the applicants will undergo a negotiation process, and DOE may cancel negotiations and rescind the selection for any reason during that time. 

Scientists seek to invent a safe, reliable, and cheap battery for electricity grids

The new Aqueous Battery Consortium of Stanford, SLAC, and 13 other research institutions, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, seeks to overcome the limitations of a battery using water as its electrolyte.

How do you store electricity in a way that is large and powerful enough to support the electric grid, as well as reliable, safe, environmentally sustainable, and inexpensive? One way may be to make a major component of the rechargeable battery mostly from water and the rest of the device primarily from abundant materials.

That is the vision of dozens of the best energy storage experts from 15 research institutions across the United States and Canada, led by Stanford University and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory . After a competitive process, the U.S. Department of Energy announced on Sept. 3 its support for this energy hub research project, called the Aqueous Battery Consortium. The project can receive up to $62.5 million over five years as part of the DOE’s Energy Innovation Hubs program. The other battery-centered Energy Innovation Hub announced today by the DOE is the Energy Storage Research Alliance, led by Argonne National Laboratory.

“This project will undertake the grand challenge of electrochemical energy storage in a world dependent on intermittent solar and wind power. We need affordable, grid-scale energy storage that will work dependably for a long time,” said the project’s director, Yi Cui , a Stanford professor of materials science and engineering, of energy science and engineering, and of photon science at SLAC.

A huge amount of stationary energy storage will be needed to reduce net global greenhouse gas emissions to zero, said Cui, and water is the only realistic solvent available at the quantity and cost needed for such batteries.

“How do we control charge transfer between solids and water from the molecular to the device scale and achieve reversibility with an efficiency of nearly 100 percent?” asked Cui. “We don’t know the solutions to those hard problems, but with the Department of Energy's support we intend to find out.”

A new aqueous battery

The lead-acid batteries that start combustion engines in conventional vehicles are a type of aqueous battery that has been in wide use for decades. However, for their size, lead-acid car batteries do not hold much energy, even though they can briefly supply a surge of current to start your car.

Also, the lead in them is toxic. Of all lead produced globally, 85 percent goes into lead-acid batteries. Although new batteries mostly use lead from recycled ones, in many countries the recycling process relies on techniques that pollute the environment and hurt human health. One in three children suffer from lead poisoning globally, according to a 2020 UNICEF report , with much of the suffering in developing economies.

With such catastrophes in mind, the research team prioritizes environmental justice, as well as the vision of sustainable, affordable, and secure energy for all people. “We hope our inventions may someday benefit all of humanity,” said Cui.

The new research project aims to develop a new kind of aqueous battery, one that is environmentally safe, has higher energy density than lead-acid batteries, and costs one-tenth that of lithium-ion batteries today. The group plans to keep costs for this future technology low by using cheaper raw materials, simpler electronics, and new, efficient manufacturing techniques. The pursued technology is also expected to be safer, and to create batteries that charge and discharge quickly.

However, “the barriers to such a new aqueous battery have stymied inventors for years,” said the project’s chief scientist, Linda Nazar , a professor of chemistry at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. Nazar has developed new materials for energy storage and conversion for the past 20 years, including aqueous batteries. “In addition to stubbornly low voltage and energy density, water can corrode battery materials, become the source of undesirable side reactions, and the cells can fail after just hundreds of charge-discharge cycles under demanding practical conditions.”

The Aqueous Battery Consortium, which will be administered by Stanford’s Precourt Institute for Energy , hopes to overcome all these challenges and, in so doing, advance battery technology broadly. The team consists of 31 leading battery scientists, engineers, and physicists from 12 universities in North America, as well as from SLAC, the U.S. Army Research Lab , and the U.S. Naval Research Lab .

Project organization

The 31 co-principal investigators and the much larger number of students and postdoctoral scholars working with the investigators are organized into six teams working on broad research aims and three teams working on challenges that cut across those goals. The research Aims cover the electrolyte, both electrodes, electrolyte/electrode interface, corrosion, and overall device architecture. The three Crosscutting Theme teams will work on materials design and synthesis, coordinated theory and simulation, and characterization of prototype devices in operation.

To ensure collaboration and interdisciplinary thinking across the project, each researcher is on at least one of the six Aims teams and at least one of the Crosscutting Theme teams.

“Our ambitious goals can be met only by a well-integrated team of experts working across disciplines, who encourage each other to think from fresh angles and with novel viewpoints,” said Johanna Nelson Weker , the Aqueous Battery Consortium’s assistant director and lead scientist in SLAC's Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource division.

“One of the teams I’m on includes a couple of physicists, a professor of chemistry, and a professor of mechanical engineering, among other disciplines,” said Nelson Weker, “but all the researchers in the project have done much work on energy storage.”

Regular meetings of all consortium members and participation in various scientific forums should help create a large intellectual community of energy storage researchers.  The consortium’s leaders hope this community will include not just the co-principal investigators, but also the scores of graduate students and postdoctoral scholars who will perform much of the research, and other battery scientists around the world. The researchers hope the Aqueous Battery Consortium will become a dynamic center for all aqueous battery research – not just its research – domestically and worldwide.

Management and oversight

The Aqueous Battery Consortium’s chief operations officer is Steve Eglash , director of the Applied Energy Division and interim chief research officer at SLAC. He is responsible for the organizational and administrative leadership of the project, including financial and personnel management, tracking and reporting research progress to the Department of Energy, environmental health and safety, and relationships with external partners.

“The Aqueous Battery Consortium is dedicated to doing the scientific research that will enable large-scale deployment of aqueous batteries," said Eglash. "The consortium will be accountable to a governance board and get external advice from two advisory boards. One will advise us on the scientific direction of our work. The other will advise us on the relevance of our work to commercial applications."

The project’s governance board will ensure institutional support and compliance. It will be led by Arun Majumdar , dean of the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability , and professor of mechanical engineering, energy science and engineering, and photon science. Steven Chu , Nobel physicist and former U.S. Secretary of Energy, will helm the scientific advisory board. Chu, Stanford professor of physics, physiology, and energy science and engineering, is also one of the project’s researchers. Ira Ehrenpreis , co-founder and managing partner of the investment fund DBL Partners, will chair the technology review board. Ehrenpreis also co-chairs the Precourt Institute for Energy's advisory council.

“Also, to make sure we are doing things correctly and consistently across the project, several team members have taken on the responsibility for overseeing crucial practices. These include data management, technology transfer, environmental health and safety, and diversity, equity and inclusion,” said Eglash, who noted that five of the consortium's 12 universities are designated minority-serving institutions.

In addition to Stanford and the University of Waterloo, the other universities contributing investigators to this project are California State University, Long Beach ; Florida A&M University/Florida State University's College of Engineering ; North Carolina State University ; Oregon State University ; San Jose State University ; UCLA ; UC-San Diego ; UC-Santa Barbara ; University of Maryland ; and University of Texas at Austin .

The co-principal investigators page on this website lists all senior researchers with links to their personal profile pages.

Cui is also the director of the Sustainability Accelerator at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, the immediate past director of the Precourt Institute for Energy, current co-director of the institute’s StorageX Initiative and director of its postdoctoral program , as well as founder of a publicly traded battery company. Nazar is also a fellow of the Royal Society (Canada) and of the Royal Society (U.K.), as well as a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Solid State Energy Materials. Majumdar is also a senior fellow at the Precourt Institute and at the Hoover Institution. Ehrenpreis, an alumnus of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and Stanford Law School, is also on Tesla Motor’s board of directors. The Precourt Institute is part of the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability.

Media contact:   Mark Golden , Communications Director, Precourt Institute for Energy and Aqueous Battery Consortium

Explore More

Department of Energy Awards $125 Million for Research to Enable Next-Generation Batteries and Energy Storage

The two Energy Innovation Hub teams, led by Stanford and Argonne National Laboratory, will emphasize multi-disciplinary fundamental research to address long-standing and emerging challenges for rechargeable batteries.

Explore NIAID Topics for Small Business Innovation Research Contract Solicitation

Funding News Edition: September 4, 2024 See more articles in this edition

NIH's SBIR program accepts Phase I, Phase II, Fast Track, and Direct-to-Phase II research proposals.

Each year, NIH solicits research proposals from small businesses through A Solicitation of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Contract Proposals . The latest version was published on August 2, 2024. The solicitation serves as a vehicle for offerors to propose research projects on a multitude of scientific topics from across NIH.

Proposals are due by October 18, 2024, at 5 p.m. Eastern Time.  

NIH’s Small Business Education and Entrepreneurial Development (SEED) program will host an HHS SBIR Contract RFP Pre-proposal Conference Webinar (PHS-2025-1) to discuss the mechanics of the contract opportunity on September 23, 2024, from 2 to 4 p.m. Eastern Time. The presentation materials will be posted on that same event page following the session. 

Note : This SBIR contract solicitation is distinct from the 2024 SBIR and STTR Omnibus/Parent Grant Solicitations for the NIH, CDC, and FDA released in July, which are notices of funding opportunities for grant awards (despite the word “solicitation” appearing in their titles). Learn about those grant opportunities in our August 7, 2024 article “ Small Business Research: Priority Funding Topics for 2025 .” 

To differentiate among the proposal types: 

• Phase I—research to determine the scientific or technical feasibility and commercial merit of the proposed research or research and development (R&D) efforts. 
• Phase II—continuance of Phase I research efforts, dependent on successful Phase I results as well as scientific and technical merit and commercial potential of further work. 
• Fast Track—simultaneous submission of Phase I and Phase II proposals, to facilitate a streamlined transition from Phase I to Phase II if merited by research outcomes. 
• Direct-to-Phase II—allows a small business concern to commence with Phase II research if Phase I stage-type research funded through other, non-SBIR/STTR sources is already complete. 

The table below summarizes NIAID’s research topics of interest for contract proposals. Refer to the attachment posted within the solicitation linked above for full details, including the number of anticipated awards and descriptions of required activities and deliverables. 

Your contract proposal should address only one topic; if you wish to pursue multiple topics, submit a separate proposal for each topic. Submit your proposal(s) through the electronic Contract Proposal Submission . Direct any technical questions about the solicitation and NIAID’s topics to Jonathan Bryan in NIAID’s Office of Acquisitions at [email protected] or 240-669-5180.  

Find general information and advice on our Small Business Programs page and contact NIAID SBIR/STTR Program Coordinator Natalia Kruchinin, Ph.D., at [email protected] for funding questions specific to small businesses.

Email us at [email protected] for help navigating NIAID’s grant and contract policies and procedures.

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2024 Research & Innovation Week

Thank you to those who joined the Office for Research & Innovation for the 2024 Duke Centennial Research & Innovation Week, celebrating the past, present, and future of research and innovation at Duke. Stay tuned for information about Research & Innovation Week 2025.

Race, Ethnicity, and Politics Panel

Core Facilities Showcase

Integrity in Scholarship: The Next 100 Years Panel

Data Visualization Competition and Showcase 

Duke Research in 2124 Panel

Monday, January 29

Depolarizing political toxicity on social media, 9:00-10:00am.

How does social media shape political polarization, and how does an interdisciplinary research team study it? We’ll discuss how we are translating our insights into tools people can use to hack political polarization from the bottom up.

• Christopher Bail, Ph.D.
• D. Sunshine Hillygus, Ph.D.
• Alexander Volfovsky, Ph.D.

Duke and NCCU

10:30-11:30am.

Join Duke and North Carolina Central University (NCCU) leaders as we discuss our rich history of collaboration and partnership and set a course for the future of Duke and NCCU collaborations.

• Bryan Batch, M.D.
• Faye Calhoun, DPA
• Lisa Davis, Ph.D.  
• Undi Hoffler, Ph.D.

Teaching Your Research: A Workshop Featuring Bass Instructional Fellows

1:00-2:00pm.

If you are considering a faculty position after your Ph.D., you would likely benefit from the opportunity to design and/or teach an undergraduate course related to your dissertation research. Join this conversation featuring current and past Bass Fellows who have served as Instructors of Record (IOR) for an interactive workshop. The session will open with brief talks from the IORs about their process of approaching the course they designed and/or taught, followed by roundtable breakout discussions with participants for the chance to workshop their own plans.

• Mason Barto , PhD Candidate in Classical Studies
• Amber Manning , PhD Candidate in English
• Sarah Petry , PhD Candidate in Public Policy Studies
• Cole Swanson , PhD Candidate in Music

Tuesday, January 30

12:00-1:30pm.

Duke provides a variety of shared resources for researchers to access equipment and services. Explore resource tables of the Core Facilities and Service Centers to see how they may be leveraged in supporting your research.

• Lunch will be provided!

AI - A Glimpse of the Future

2:30-3:30pm (registration full).

Delve into the new world of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a panel of experts discuss its ever-evolving landscape and illuminate present and future trends shaping AI research, education, and policy.

• Larry Carin, Ph.D.
• Matthew Hirschey, Ph.D.
• Lee Tiedrich, J.D.

Race, Ethnicity, and Politics Research

4:00-5:00pm.

Duke's Department of Political Science was among the first departments in the country to include race and ethnicity as a distinct subfield of study for Ph.D. students in political science. Race, Ethnicity, and Politics (REP) is now one of the most vigorous and fastest growing areas of study and research in political science. This panel will examine Duke’s pioneering role in the evolution and development of the REP subfield. 

• Kerry L. Haynie, Ph.D.
• Jennifer L. Hochschild, Ph.D.
• Paula D. McClain, Ph.D.
• Efrén O. Pérez, Ph.D. (’08)
• Candis Watts Smith, Ph.D. (’11)

Wednesday, January 31

Research town hall - integrity in scholarship: the next 100 years, 9:00-10:30am.

In an age where information is more accessible than ever, the ethical and practical dimensions of conducting research are constantly evolving. "Emerging Challenges in Research Integrity: The Next 100 Years" is a gathering for Duke faculty, staff, students, alumni and community members who are passionate about upholding the highest standards of research ethics. Engage with Duke experts discussing real-life examples of ethical challenges.

Attending this event fulfills the RCR-200 requirement , but participants must attend for at least 60 minutes to receive credit.

• Brian McAdoo, Ph.D.
• Ross McKinney, M.D.
• Michael Pencina, Ph.D.
• Geeta Swamy, M.D.
• Kanecia Zimmerman, M.D.

Daubechies Lecture: Being a Woman in Science and Leadership

11:00-12:00pm with lunch reception to follow the lecture.

Keynote lecturer, Dr. Nancy Andrews, will provide an historical and personal perspective on how women’s opportunities and challenges have evolved over the past half century, how women continue to face inequities today, and how we can work towards a better future.

Please see  Daubechies Lectures for additional information about the lecture series.

Nancy Andrews, M.D., Ph.D.

Researcher Fundamentals Sessions

2:00-4:45pm in trent semans great hall and duke medicial pavilion 2w93.

Thursday, February 1

Climate solutions, 10:30-11:30am.

The panel discussion will focus scientific, technological, and policy aspects of climate solution strategies.

• Drew Shindell, Ph.D.
• Laura Dalton, Ph.D.
• Jeff Vincent, Ph.D.
• Lydia Olander, Ph.D.
• Jackson Ewing, Ph.D.

Research Data Visualization Showcase

12:00-2:00pm.

View submissions for the research data visualization competition focusing on the theme "Through Time." Data Visualization experts will judge entries in three career-stage categories and award First, Second, and Third place cash prizes in each category. 

Access additional information and submission instructions

Duke Research in 2124

2:00-3:30pm.

What will invention, science and scholarship have created, discovered and solved 100 years from now? What vexing problems might not be solved? We convene a panel of young scholars and an audience who dare to dream and don’t mind making wild predictions.

• Muath Bishawi, MD, PhD, MPH, Surgery Fellow
• Pranam Chatterjee, Ph.D.
• Briana Grenert, PhD Candidate in Religious Studies
• Gabriela Nagle Alverio, J.D./Ph.D. Candidate

Duke and the FDA

A panel of experts discuss the collaborative relationship between Duke and the FDA, exploring how it impacts regulatory policies, fosters innovation, and propels advancements in healthcare.

• Lesley Curtis, Ph.D.
• Mark McClellan, M.D., Ph.D.
• Ehsan Samei, Ph.D.

Friday, February 2

From science to society: how discovery-driven research makes an impact.

A panel of current and former Duke faculty, staff, students share their stories of successful innovations and entrepreneurial opportunities that resulted from their research.

• Ouwen Huang, M.D./Ph.D. Candidate
• Kelli Luginbuhl, Ph.D.
• Benjamin Wiley, Ph.D.

Advancements in RNA Medicine

Explore the cutting-edge landscape of RNA medicine as this panel delves into the latest breakthroughs and a glimpse into the transformative potential of RNA in revolutionizing the future of healthcare.

• Josh Huang, Ph.D.
• Kate Meyer, Ph.D.

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• Funding Programs
• Public Wireless Supply Chain Innovation Fund

Innovation Fund Round 1 (2023) Research and Development, Testing and Evaluation

This section provides more information on the Innovation Fund’s grant program. Explore the full list of grant recipients and learn how their projects are driving wireless innovation. The Innovation Fund’s first NOFO focused on two areas: testing and evaluation (T&E) and research and development (R&D) into testing methods.

Research and Development

The Research & Development (R&D) focus area invests in the development of new/improved testing methods. These testing methods will assess the interoperability, performance, and/or security of networks.

Testing and Evaluation

The T&E focus area awards grants to proposals that streamline testing and evaluation across the U.S. Advanced access to affordable T&E lowers the barriers of entry for new and emerging entities, like small companies, start-ups, and SEDI businesses.

$140.4 million

Awarded to Date

Public Wireless Supply Chain Innovation Fund Grant Program Awards

Applications Received

Innovation Fund Program Snapshot

You can visit the Innovation Fund Program Snapshot page or download a one-page summary of the Public Wireless Supply Chain Innovation by clicking on the button below.

Program Documentation

The Program Documentation section has details on learning more about the Innovation Fund Grant Program and how to apply. Visit the following page to find out more.

See Program Awardees

Visit the Awardees page for the awardees funding allocations and related awardee information.

Related content

Dish wireless, project title:, virginia tech, virginia polytechnic institute and state university.

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Regional Resilience Innovation Incubator (R2I2)

View guidelines, important information about nsf’s implementation of the revised 2 cfr.

NSF Financial Assistance awards (grants and cooperative agreements) made on or after October 1, 2024, will be subject to the applicable set of award conditions, dated October 1, 2024, available on the NSF website . These terms and conditions are consistent with the revised guidance specified in the OMB Guidance for Federal Financial Assistance published in the Federal Register on April 22, 2024.

Important information for proposers

All proposals must be submitted in accordance with the requirements specified in this funding opportunity and in the NSF Proposal & Award Policies & Procedures Guide (PAPPG) that is in effect for the relevant due date to which the proposal is being submitted. It is the responsibility of the proposer to ensure that the proposal meets these requirements. Submitting a proposal prior to a specified deadline does not negate this requirement.

Supports collaborative, community-engaged initiatives to develop and implement scalable solutions to climate-related challenges by translating recent research advancements in climate and Earth system science into practical applications.

The Regional Resilience Innovation Incubators (R2I2) is a cross-directorate NSF solicitation led by the Directorate for Geosciences (GEO) and the Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships (TIP). R2I2 will support community- engaged team science to co-design high-impact solutions to climate-related societal challenges that leverage recent advances in fundamental climate change and Earth system science research. Each R2I2 project will address specific regional climate challenges and will develop and demonstrate solutions to those challenges that can be effectively applied in real- world settings. Investment in R2I2 will leverage past federal investments in addressing climate change and will provide a bridge connecting advancements in basic science with local knowledge, informed decision making, and technological innovations for societal applications.

R2I2 will be implemented in two phases, concept creation and implementation. This solicitation, focused on Phase-1, will fund a series of pilot projects focusing on project concept creation and refinement for solutions specific to a U.S. climate region.

Targeted areas for establishing R2I2 incubators will be based on ten climate regions defined by the Fifth National Climate Assessment (Table 1.1): Northeast, Southeast, U.S. Caribbean, Midwest, Northern Great Plains, Southern Great Plains, Northwest, Southwest, Alaska, and Hawaii & U.S. Affiliated Pacific Islands. Although geographic diversity will be a factor considered when determining the portfolio of awards, the review process may result in funding multiple projects in one climate region and none in others. Individual R2I2 projects may propose solutions that apply to more than one climate region defined above. This solicitation will also fund an award for the creation of a R2I2 National Office (RNO) to support the collective and coordinated implementation of R2I2 award activities.

NSF envisions the release of a separate solicitation for Phase-2 implementation projects in fiscal year 2026, subject to the availability of funds. Only Phase-1 award recipients will be eligible to submit Phase-2 proposals. Phase-2 awards will be selected based on a merit review of Phase-2 proposals and performance during Phase-1.

Program contacts

Awards made through this program

Organization(s).

• Directorate for Geosciences (GEO)
• Division of Research, Innovation, Synergies, and Education (GEO/RISE)
• Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships (TIP)
• Division of Innovation and Technology Ecosystems (TIP/ITE)