NSF Experiments With New Kind of Science Funding

Uncle Sam wants you to solve big scientific and engineering bottlenecks outside the hallowed walls of academia. On 14 May, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) issued a solicitation inviting what it calls “X-Labs,” or independent research organizations, to apply for a total of US $1.5 billion over 10 years. The structure of the X-labs solicitation is new for the United States government and closely matches an emerging private funding model for what are known as focused-research organizations (FROs), which various think tanks and philanthropies have proposed and tested during the last six years. A focused-research organization is a team of scientists, engineers, and other technology developers that works on a well-defined problem with a target duration of three to seven years and on a