重点研究Organizations to Accelerate Science, Technology, and Medicine
概括
The next administration should rapidly create new Focused Research Organizations (FROs) to tackle scientific and technological challenges that cannot be efficiently addressed by standard organizational structures including academia, industry, National Laboratories, or Advanced Research Project Agencies (e.g., DARPA). FROs would be independent from existing universities or labs, focused on a single basic science or technology problem, and organized similarly to a startup. FROs would fill a key structural gap in our nation’s research and development (R&D) system, enabling major advances in areas that (i) require levels of coordinated engineering or system-building inaccessible to academia, (ii) benefit society broadly in ways that industry cannot rapidly monetize, and (iii) harbor opportunities for acceleration through innovative new technologies and processes. Each FRO would produce a well-defined tool or technology, a key scientific dataset, or a refined process or resource that would dramatically boost progress and help maintain U.S. competitiveness in a broad technological or scientific field. Relevant areas for FROs include brain mapping, climate technology, biological tool and reagent development, data generation for preventative medicine, novel antibiotic development, nanofabrication, and more.
Challenge and Opportunity
The U.S. government is ill-equipped to fund R&D projects that require tight coordination and teamwork to create public goods. The majority of government-funded research outside of the defense sphere—including research funded through the National Institute of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E)—is outsourced to externalized collaborations of university labs and/or commercial organizations. However, the academic reward structure favors individual credit and discourages systematic teamwork. Commercial incentives encourage teamwork but discourage the production of public goods. As a result, the United States is falling behind in key areas like microfabrication and human genomics to countries with greater abilities to centralize and accelerate focused research.
The solution is to enable the U.S. government to fund centralized research programs, termed Focused Research Organizations (FROs), to address well-defined challenges that require scale and coordination but that are not immediately profitable. FROs would be stand-alone “moonshot organizations” insulated from both academic and commercial incentive structures. FROs would be organized like startups, but they would pursue well-defined R&D goals in the public interest and would be accountable to their funding organizations rather than to shareholders. Each FRO would strive to accelerate a key R&D area via “multiplier effects” (such as dramatically reducing the cost of collecting critical scientific data), provide the United States with a decisive competitive advantage in that area, and de-risk substantial follow-on investment from the private and/or public sectors. Some FROs would lay the engineering foundations for subsequent government investment in programs similar in scope to the Human Genome Project.
以前仅偶尔并通过不同的机制建立了单独的from样实体。最近，《国家量子倡议法》在国家实验室内建立了五个越来越多的中心，每个中心每年以2500万美元资助，以追求量子信息技术的进步。但是，在各个领域中相似的中心的概念和创建没有系统的，敏捷的过程。建立目前的任何类似fro的实体都需要国会批准，这是一个繁重且耗时的过程。
We expect FROs to attract broad bipartisan and popular support due to their potential to spawn new industries and establish American leadership. Precedent supports this expectation. The National Quantum Initiative Act, for instance, was co-sponsored by the bipartisan coalition of Lamar Alexander (R-TX), John Thune (R-SD), and Bill Nelson (D-FL), and passed the Senate by unanimous consent.
Plan of Action
The next administration should support the rapid establishment of 16 new FROs: four per year for the next four years, totaling 16 FROs. The next administration should work with Congress to secure new funding for these FROs, and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) should oversee the development of a cross-disciplinary program to conceive and launch the FROs.
资金
The total program budget for 16 FROs should be roughly $1 billion, or about $25–75 million per FRO allocated over 5-7 years (e.g., roughly $5–15 million per FRO per year). This is roughly 10 times the funding level accessible via a typical academic grant, yet comparable in cost to a DARPA project or to a philanthropic project like the Allen Institute’s Mouse Brain Atlas (~$55 million). Moreover, this level of funding is similar to the funding needed by a Series A/B “hard tech” startup to achieve proof of concept for a new technology prior to commercialization. Funding should be authorized for the FRO program as whole rather than for each individual component. This will enable the program to move quickly and independently, in similar fashion to DARPA. Funding the program as a whole will also support cross-disciplinary FROs and FRO initiatives. Agencies such as NIH, NSF, the Department of Energy (DOE), the various ARPAs, or the “Directorate for Technology” proposed in the Endless Frontier Act could be involved in the FRO program and could solicit or put forward specific FROs.1
Logistics
应将组织和运营旨在使Fros成为敏捷，灵活和自我指导的过程。每个来回应独立于现有组织，例如国家实验室或其他政府机构和学术机构的实验室。每个来回将由首席执行官/CTO经营，并由来自行业和学术界的训练有素的集中式初创企业团队组成。与使用现有实体（例如大学）作为表演者的外部合作研究计划相比，这种人员结构将使团队激励措施和重点更加紧密。与单个计划经理协调的类似DARPA的外部化努力相比，这种结构还可以使激励措施和重点更加紧密（尽管可以创建一些FROS作为结果或类似DARPA的计划的第二阶段）。通常，弗罗斯将出租商业房地产进行运营。在极少数情况下，Fros使用国家实验室设施可能是合适的。弗罗斯（Fros）的薪酬结构应具有灵活性，以允许招募顶级人才。
FROs should be expressly time-bound and outcome driven in order to prevent mission creep and organizational aging. This will require clear and pre-defined end-points/exits. As an FRO sunsets, stakeholders in that FRO’s outputs should be convened to maximize output deployment and uptake. Intellectual property should be out-licensed or released publicly for similar reasons. Transition support should be provided to outgoing FRO employees. Follow-on from FROs could include formation and/or incubation of new companies, larger public-sector projects, and/or creation of facilities designed to host and maintain FRO outputs (e.g., datasets or tools).
Mission Selection
来回应该追求特定的目标,如果实现d, will dramatically increase the R&D capacity and/or technological capabilities of the United States in a given field. To preserve the FRO program’s ability to pursue specific, focused innovation objectives, FROs would operate for defined time periods and would not ordinarily be renewed. Renewal would only be permitted in exceptional cases in which an FRO proves that an extension of that FRO would be as impactful as the initial investment. More frequently, we expect that an FRO might serve as proof of concept for a project or initiative that could then be separately pursued through an act of Congress or through a public-private partnership. All new FROs should meet following two criteria:
- FROs should betransformative.虽然FROS可能有时会整合现有的方法以直接生产新的数据集或临床/科学结果，但FROS通常应集中于开发变革性的新技术，系统或过程。这些功能应降低成本和/或提高随后的科学，临床或其他下游努力的速度和可靠性，从而大大提高了美国的整体科学和技术发展速度。
- FROs should befocused.Each FRO should be established with a clear, goal-oriented purpose. FROs should driven by quantitative metrics and/or concrete design goals and should be limited in scope and duration. Serendipitous discoveries made during the course of FRO research that are outside of the mission scope should be shared freely with external researchers for follow-up. Though we expect FROs to work closely with universities, FROs must not become subject to academic incentives and must avoid mission creep. Although an FRO may maintain external (e.g., academic) advisors and consultants, core staff must be appointed full-time at the FRO.
为了确保对Fros的有效和决定性的选择和监督，可以招募专门的创新计划经理（而不是同行审稿人委员会），以帮助推动政府方面的少量Fros的构想，选择和形成。DARPA类似地任命计划经理而不是委员会，以实现有远见或不同观点的拥抱。计划经理应愿意对“月球车”项目冒险，而这些项目对可行性或可能的价值没有共识。
Please download the PDF version of this memo to view the FAQ Section.
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