Article by Martin Ho, Pramod P. Khargonekar, Eoin O’Sullivan: “It has been many decades since the American research enterprise operated under the blueprint pioneered by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s science advisor, Vannevar Bush, in his 1945 report, Science, The Endless Frontier. His postwar model of public agencies steering “Big Science” projects, such as moonshots and particle accelerators, through stable, long-term commitments has given way to a complex ecosystem of public, private, and philanthropic actors with divergent roadmaps, incentives, and risk tolerances. The scientific establishment’s imperative, therefore, is to understand and reconsider how the R&D ecosystem now operates. Above all, can the diverse institutions—federal agencies, universities, industry, and philanthropies—self-organize to achieve ambitious scientific endeavors?
The challenge is particularly acute here in the United States, but it’s not limited to North America. A 2024 review of Horizon Europe, the European Union’s seven-year framework for funding research and innovation, found that “most actors are still in the process of ‘sense-making.’” Shifting from more laissez-faire guidance to a mission-oriented approach, the Horizon programs explicitly tie funding to five societal missions. This kind of grand challenges framework is becoming more popular; since COVID, the United Kingdom committed over £1 billion to its Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA), and Germany devoted €1 billion to its Federal Agency for Breakthrough Innovation (SPRIND)—both high-risk funding agencies that replicate the model of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). New specialist funders, or focused research organizations, have adopted similarly inspired program management practices to de-risk and promote grand challenge–relevant technologies.
Today scientists and engineers face a profound question: How do we tackle grand challenges—climate change, environmental sustainability, energy security, pandemics, cancer, AI governance, and more—when our R&D system is so fragmented? The answer is not to try to restore the old centralized system (which, for all its strengths, often struggled to advance grand challenges), but rather to master new mechanisms that coordinate effectively across a diverse, decentralized network of public agencies, private industry, and philanthropic organizations in ways that make us even more effective than we were before…(More)”.
