Scientific innovation
How can fundamentally new ideas get funded?
My work on the organization of science asks how funding institutions can support new explanatory frameworks, reward intellectual risk, and encourage scientific entrepreneurship.
This project extends my interest in innovation and incumbent advantage from biological evolution to the institutions through which scientific ideas develop.
The funding conundrum
A researcher may encounter anomalies that suggest the need for a different theoretical approach. Existing evidence may support the new perspective, but its generality remains uncertain until it has been developed and tested across multiple situations.
An established paradigm, in contrast, already has a diversified collection of specialized models, accumulated evidence, and a community of experts. A new framework must demonstrate that it resolves anomalies and generates useful predictions before it can acquire comparable support.
This creates a practical difficulty: preliminary evidence is needed to obtain funding, but funding is needed to develop the new line of research and collect that evidence. The difficulty can be especially acute when the proposed approach challenges the assumptions of the established program.
Incumbent advantage in science
Scientific theories and research programs can acquire incumbent advantages. Their early development supports specialization, institutional investment, and the accumulation of expertise. These strengths can also make it difficult for competing frameworks to gain a foothold.
My research asks how scientific institutions can preserve the value of established knowledge while creating opportunities for new approaches to demonstrate their explanatory power. The aim is to make rigorous investigation of unfamiliar ideas more feasible.
Scientific entrepreneurship
My manuscript examines an economic analogy: science funding is often allocated through program officers and expert review, while market economies offer a different set of incentives for taking risks on innovation.
I ask how entrepreneurial incentives might be adapted to scientific knowledge, where the benefits of discovery are often non-appropriable and cannot be captured exclusively by the person or organization that produces them.
The proposal outlines a funding system that could be implemented in a Web 3.0 ecosystem. Its purpose is to encourage the development and testing of new ideas by adapting incentives for innovation to the distinctive economics of science.
Development of the project
An inquiry from a military official who had read my natural-reward article prompted me to develop these ideas into a manuscript on science funding. The manuscript was subsequently circulated to officials at the US Pentagon, where I gave an online presentation.
The manuscript, How to reward innovation and encourage entrepreneurship in science, remains a work in progress.