Why Do Research Institutes Often Look the Same?
The essay that inspired this website!
Focused Research Organizations to Accelerate Science, Technology, and Medicine
The foundational paper that defined the FRO model and made the case for a new class of research institution.
Research Leaders' Playbook: Tools and tactics for leading coordinated research programs
A mammoth guide to evaluating, creating, managing private, ARPA-like research programs. I can't claim I've read it all!
The innovation menagerie: New institutional structures are expanding horizons for early-stage research
An introduction to novel research structures. He classifies them into project-funded research vs core-funded research.
A Scrappy Complement to FROs: Building More BBNs
Eric coined the term BBN (aka Frontier Research Contracts). His substack FreakTakes dives into the history of 20th Century innovation to understand how we can build better science and engineering institutions today.
The Overedge Catalog
A curated collection of new and unusual research organisation types that sit at the intersection of academia, nonprofits, and tech startups.
Building and Running Scientific Institutions. On the design of research machines
A very quirky, very cool list of interesting research institutions. Lots of links and extra reading.
Erika's quick-start guide to research nonprofits
A practical, first-person guide to starting a nonprofit research organisation outside academia — including fundraising, two-pagers, and community.
Scientific Field Creation
A practical playbook for field-building as a philanthropic strategy — with case studies in climate, aging, and other emerging fields.
Incentives and Creativity: Evidence from the Academic Life Sciences
This study compares the careers of HHMI investigators, who receive flexible, long-term funding with high autonomy, to NIH-funded scientists who operate under shorter, more structured grant cycles. It finds that HHMI investigators produce a higher rate of high-impact papers and are more likely to shift toward novel lines of research, suggesting that greater funding flexibility encourages more exploratory science.