Last Friday, December 12, The U.S. National Science Foundation Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships (NSF TIP) announced the Tech Labs Initiative to launch and scale a new generation of transformative independent research organizations to advance breakthrough science:

The NSF TIP Tech Labs initiative is grounded in the recognition that many of the technology acceleration and translation challenges of today require new approaches with coordinated, interdisciplinary teams to achieve success. The Tech Labs initiative will support full-time teams of researchers, scientists, and engineers who will enjoy operational autonomy and milestone-based funding as they pursue technical breakthroughs that have the potential to reshape or create entire technology sectors. Tech Labs teams will move beyond traditional research outputs (e.g., publications and datasets), with sufficient resources, financial runway, and independence to transition critical technology from early concept or prototypes to commercially viable platforms ready for private investment to scale and deploy. NSF anticipates significant investment later in FY 2026, featuring large, multi-year awards for selected teams.

In the coming weeks, NSF TIP will also release more information about a companion initiative, the NSF TIP Tech Accelerators Initiative. Both initiatives are guided by the ambition of President Trump’s mandate to revitalize and strengthen America’s science and technology ecosystem:

We are going to conquer the vast frontiers of science, and we are going to lead
humanity into space and plant the American flag on the planet Mars and even far
beyond. And, through it all, we are going to rediscover the unstoppable power ofthe
American spirit, and we are going to renew unlimited promise of the American dream.

The initiatives attempt to respond to a widespread demand. The challenge to find new productive ideas is getting harder, or so it seems, and competition is on the rise.

For the last 75 years, U.S. science funding has relied on project-based grants awarded to individual investigators at universities. While this model has delivered significant discoveries, it is poorly suited for research requiring large-scale infrastructure, focused interdisciplinary collaboration, or long-term investment.

The Solution?

Stuart Buck, Executive Director of the Good Science Project, argues that rather than relying on the often-invoked Bell Labs and Xerox PARC, we should look for inspiration at other organizations — symphony orchestras and professional sports teams.

Caleb Watney, co-founder and co-CEO of the Institute for Progress (IFP), proposes The X-Labs Initiative:

The traditional, university-driven science funding model that has dominated our research landscape over the last 75 years is beginning to show its age. To maintain U.S. scientific leadership, the White House should coordinate the launch of 20 new “X-Labs” by 2026, each funded at $10 million to $50 million per year through reallocated National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and Department of Energy (DOE) budgets. These labs would be independent research institutions selected through a competitive review process, designed to accelerate team-based, high-risk, high-reward, basic science in fields such as biotechnology, materials science, next-generation energy, and chronic disease research — addressing research problems that university-imposed structures and private markets are not well-suited to solve.

Jeff Tsao, Senior Scientist at Sandia National Laboratory, seems more nostalgic:

The American research enterprise, long the global leader, faces intensifying competition and mounting criticism regarding its productivity and relevance to societal challenges. At the same time, a vital component of a healthy research enterprise has been lost: corporate research labs, epitomized by the iconic Bell Labs of the 20th century.

Rebuilding such labs in a 21st century “Bell Labs X” form would restore a powerful and uniquely American approach to technoscientific discovery—harnessing the private sector to discover and invent in ways that fundamentally improve U.S. national and economic competitiveness.

Bell Labs was a crucible of innovation where brilliant minds were exposed to and inspired by real-world problems, then given the freedom to explore those problems in deep and fundamental ways, often pivoting to and solving unanticipated new problems of even greater importance.

Or perhaps not…

Recreating that innovative environment is possible and its impact on American research productivity would be profound. By innovating how we innovate, we would leap-frog other nations who are investing heavily in their own research productivity but are largely copying the structure of the current U.S. research enterprise.

I’ll stick with his conclusion, which fully aligns with the philosophy of Mind The Post:

Disruptive and useful ideas are not getting harder to find, our current research enterprise is just not well optimized to find them.

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Featured Image: Leonard Cohen, Old Ideas, Cover Art