Primers
Primers on the structural conditions for next-generation research and innovation — the institutional forms, funding arrangements, and social processes that determine what kinds of science are possible at all.
Understand
Situational awareness — the forces, dynamics, and conditions shaping what research is structurally possible.
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What Is Metascience? The Study and Design of How Science Works
Metascience defined: its lineage from Bush and Merton through the reproducibility crisis and progress studies, its two temperaments (reliability vs. productivity), the main strands of the field, and the critiques levelled against it. An orientation for the rest of this resource.
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Ecosystem Forces: The External Conditions Shaping What Research Is Possible
A working map of the geopolitical, technological, environmental, political, economic, social, and epistemic forces that determine what kinds of research and innovation are structurally possible at a given moment — updated as forces develop.
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The Diversity Problem: Institutions, Science, and What Makes Research Possible
Why research ecosystems converge on single institutional models, what external conditions produce and sustain institutional diversity, and what the current moment of new institution-building actually means.
Plan
Methods for identifying what to work on, where the gaps are, and how to sequence effort toward a goal.
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Scientific Roadmapping
What roadmaps are, why they are built, and how they differ from project plans and strategy documents. Covers the main types (technology, research, mission, field-wide), roadmapping across scales from individual to transnational, adjacent formats (vision papers, grand challenge statements, mission maps), and the main formal methods (Tiling Tree, Target Product Profiles). Curated examples and further reading included.
Build
Organizational forms, funding arrangements, and infrastructure for different kinds of science.
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Funding Mechanisms: How the Design of Research Money Shapes What Science Happens
The dominant model (project grants by peer review) and its documented pathologies; the main alternatives — lotteries, prizes, advance market commitments, people-not-projects funding, fast grants; design dimensions that distinguish them; and the European and Nordic funding landscape.
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People, Not Projects: Funding Researchers Instead of Research Plans
A deep dive on funding people rather than plans: the problem with project grants, the HHMI-versus-NIH evidence that people funding produces both more hits and more misses, the design dimensions that make it work, the main instruments including the Danish NNF Laureate and Villum Investigator programmes, and the limits.
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Fast Grants: Small, Rapid, Light-Touch Research Funding
A deep dive on small, fast, discretionary grants: the origins in the COVID-era Fast Grants programme and Emergent Ventures, the survey evidence on funding rigidity, the design dimensions, the trade-offs of speed and discretion, the recent wave including British Progress, and the fit with the Danish foundations.
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Enterprise Foundations: Commercial Ownership, Patient Capital, and Long-Horizon Research
How foundations that own commercial companies produce a distinctive form of research funding — patient capital insulated from political cycles — and what the Danish model, its international variations, and their governance challenges reveal about institutional diversity in science.
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Focused Research Organizations: The Time-Limited Nonprofit Built to Solve One Problem
The FRO model: what it is, the structural gap it fills between academia and industry, how FROs are originated and funded, what the first generation has produced, and what remains unproven. Covers the Lean FRO, E11 Bio, Cultivarium, [C]Worthy, ARIA’s first UK FROs, and the NSF’s $1.5 billion X-Labs commitment.
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Decentralized Science (DeSci): Tokenized Funding, Governance, and IP
Token-based governance, tokenized IP (IP-NFTs), and DAOs applied to research funding and ownership: the premise, the origins and the 2024 token surge, the building blocks, what it is actually funding (VitaDAO, Gero, BIO Protocol, OpenLabs), where it fits, and the serious critiques around volatility, governance, and regulation.