About Focused Research Organizations

New types of organization are needed to accelerate scientific progress.

Academic research groups and startup companies are essential to science and technology development. But there are some projects they just aren’t suited for. A university astronomy lab couldn’t have launched the Hubble Space Telescope on its own, nor would a venture-backed startup have built the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

Hubble and CERN illustrate a common pattern in science: a need for projects that are bigger than an academic lab can undertake, more coordinated than a loose consortium or themed department, and not directly profitable enough to be a venture-backed startup or industrial R&D project.

Focused Research Organizations (FROs) are a new type of scientific institution designed to fill this gap.

In brief, the defining features of an FRO are that:

  • They are “focused” in that they pursue prespecified, quantifiable technical milestones rather than open-ended, blue-sky research. They must achieve these milestones within a finite time (usually ~5 years) to avoid mission creep and preserve focus. While an FRO may pivot its strategy, its goals do not change.

  • They produce high-impact public goods to dramatically accelerate progress in key areas of science and technology. These public goods are technically ambitious and often engineering-heavy to create, like massive datasets, next-generation analytical devices, or open-source experimental protocols.

  • They are led by a full-time founding team, and consist of a larger-than-academic-scale team of 10 to 30 (or possibly more) scientists, engineers, and operational staff. FROs execute like the best deep-tech startups: tight-knit, fast-moving, and mission-driven.

  • As they near completion, FROs actively disseminate and deploy the public goods they create into the real world, whether by open-sourcing data, spinning out one or more nonprofits or startups, engaging in partnerships with existing institutions, or by other means.

FROs are not intended to be a replacement for any part of the existing scientific ecosystem. And most of the world’s scientific endeavors don’t need to be done via an FRO. But we have found that a large number of important scientific problems require a structure like an FRO to be tackled.

Just as startups make it possible to pursue ambitious business ideas outside of large companies, FROs enable individuals outside existing institutions to pursue ambitious, engineering- and operations-intensive, scientific public goods projects.

We also hope that the existence of FROs will increase the level of ambition of the scientific community. We want researchers to be asking themselves, “What key bottleneck to scientific and technical progress could I address as the leader of a dream team of 10-30 scientists and engineers?” And even beyond that, “What new types of funding, organizational, and incentive structures could I devise to address bottlenecks beyond those that FROs are suited for?”

Frequently Asked Questions

  • Convergent Research is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.

    We help incubate, find philanthropic donors for, and launch FROs. We also provide FROs with operational support throughout their duration.

    Our team comprises scientists and technical experts with combined experience at MIT, Caltech, Neuralink, DeepMind, Amazon, Oxford, Harvard, and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

  • Schmidt Futures played a critical role in helping launch Convergent Research as an independent 501(c)3 by providing funding to Convergent Research as well as multiple FROs.

  • Yes! We gladly accept FRO idea submissions at any time.

  • We start by performing systematic technical roadmapping research to identify bottlenecks to progress in key scientific fields. This roadmapping takes the form of targeted investigations conducted with world-leading scientists, workshops to bring together diverse perspectives on the challenges facing specific scientific fields, fellowships and competitions for whitepapers, and other methods. We also solicit abstracts for FROs through broad, open outreach to scientists and other interested citizens.

    Our team initially evaluates incoming few-page proposals at a high level, with targeted outreach to domain experts and iterative follow-up conversations with the proposers as needed to ensure their idea is a potential fit for an FRO.

    We then assess whether there is potential interest from a funder in our network for the FRO idea. If a project has sufficient funder interest, we help the FRO founding team incubate the idea.

  • Convergent Research does not fund FROs directly. We attempt to match proposed FROs and their founding teams with members of our network of potential funders.

    Once a potential funder is identified for a proposed FRO, we guide the prospective FRO’s founding team in writing an extensive technical proposal, including defining the specific milestones they intend to achieve in their project and their plans for technology transfer. These proposals are extensively reviewed and improved, typically in collaboration with world experts in the relevant scientific fields.

    • "Just do what my lab already does, but with more money."

      If a scientific project can be readily done in an academic lab, it should be done there! It is not worth the effort of setting up an entirely new nonprofit organization if doing so is not required to undertake a project. Projects for which it is required often involve hiring many engineers or other non-trainee talent at industry wages, or doing significant amounts of non-publishable work, both of which are hard in an academic lab.

    • "Hire 20 of the best researchers and let them work on blue-sky, individual projects in the same building."

      This does not take advantage of the multidisciplinary hiring opportunities or the startup-like organization structure that FROs afford.

    • “Do my startup idea, just with nonprofit funding”

      If a scientific project can be done as a startup (without severely curtailing or altering its mission) then it should be done as a startup. There is much more venture capital in the world than philanthropic capital for science.

    • "Directly work on the biggest intellectual/commercial challenge in the field."

      The purpose of FROs is to catalyze scientific progress. That is not always the same as directly working on the white whale of a field. Many transformative projects in science, especially tool-building or infrastructure projects, are unglamorous and underrated. Many such projects are well-suited for FROs.

  • Yes. We regularly consult with experts on specific risks, and have already ruled out incubating 3-4 potential FROs due to risk considerations (such as having too much downside potential alongside its potential benefits).

  • The FRO model is applicable to many fields of science. We are currently incubating FROs in climate measurement, mathematical theorem proving, materials science, and other areas.

    The first set of FROs launched were biology-focused mainly because of the biology expertise present in Convergent Research at the time of its founding, but we have since expanded and continue to expand our purview.

  • Academic labs excel at open-ended discovery but are often ill-suited for capital- and teamwork-intensive systems engineering projects. Academic incentives revolve around the creativity of individual scientists as reflected by publications and grant funding rather than the productivity of large teams over relatively long periods of time.

    Government agencies, national labs, or other large scientific institutions often undertake pivotal, high-capex scientific projects, but can take a long time to respond to rapidly emerging scientific opportunities in a focused, concentrated way. Launching these projects also requires coordinating and influencing large bureaucracies, an opportunity not available to every team with a good idea.

    ARPA-style programs coordinate distributed teams based at existing organizations, each working on their own sub-project, whereas each FRO is a new, dedicated organization, focusing on a single project. See also this explanation.

    Startups face market and investor pressure to create marketable products and capture value rather than build public goods. Industrial R&D projects can be more patient and focused on fundamental research, but such projects are still ultimately pursued with the aim of furthering a company’s interests and are therefore not amenable to every important scientific project.

    The original whitepaper in the Day One Project that proposed the idea of an FRO began to lay out some approximate comparisons, as well.

  • Even if your project is potentially a fit for the FRO model, if it can be done by another mechanism without severely curtailing or altering its mission, it likely should be. FROs take a lot of work to fundraise for, launch, and run compared to doing a project in an existing institution. And they are a relatively new model compared to the mature VC ecosystem, which has more opportunity for funding and support.

  • You don’t! Convergent Research doesn’t own the idea of FROs. We are actively encouraging others to pursue different versions of the model. However, Convergent Research offers a lot of support for FROs.

  • We expect people who work at FROs to have many opportunities in industry and academia after the FRO. Indeed, if the FRO goes well, FRO founders and employees will likely be the world’s experts in the new industry or research field spawned by their efforts at the FRO.

  • Gifts to Convergent Research can support FROs at three levels:

    At the $10M+ level, you can potentially anchor a new FRO. This could be an FRO we’ve identified and pre-reviewed (we are happy to share a catalog of ideas), or it could be a pre-commitment that you’d be willing to fund an FRO in an area of your interest if and when we incubate one.

    At the $1M+ level, you can join in funding an FRO that already has an anchor donor. Such contributions can often be de-risked by making such contributions contingent on adequate progress of the FRO. Or you can support a team of potential FRO founders to do full-time de-risking research as they develop a full FRO proposal.

    At the $10k+ level, you can support our scientific roadmapping and FRO sourcing programs. For example, ~$60k is enough to support a workshop and whitepaper to develop ideas for FROs in an area of your interest.

    For for-profit funders, some FROs may be seeking joint ventures or investment in spinoff startups in the case that this maximizes public benefit from the technology they develop.

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  • FROs are finite-duration projects. During their later years they work to actively disseminate and deploy the public goods they create into the real world.

    In some cases, public benefit will best be served by licensing technologies developed by the FRO to companies or by spinning off startups.

    Free use of FRO IP for research purposes by academics and non-profits will be preserved regardless of the commercialization plan.

  • A top priority for FROs is ensuring the results of their work are disseminated and used broadly across the scientific field of which they are a part. This work starts before the FRO even launches: much of the FRO proposal review process is spent thoroughly vetting how specifically researchers would use the FRO’s proposed outputs to transform their work.

    More concretely, here’s a non-exhaustive list of things FROs might do:

    • Release open-source or open-access datasets and protocols

    • Distribute reagents or tools to researchers

    • Publish research papers

    • Publish educational resources, or host visitors and run workshops to teach new techniques

    • Integrate their technologies into larger academic, philanthropic, or government projects

    • License IP to companies when doing so is necessary to achieve maximal public benefit

    • Spin out new for- or non-profit entities that provide ongoing services to the research community

  • Convergent Research and FROs are part of a larger movement to explore new mechanisms for funding, organizing, and incentivizing scientific research. Good resources for learning more about this include A Vision of Metascience by Michael Nielsen and Kanjun Qiu, The Overedge Catalog by Samuel Arbesman, and Understanding science funding in tech, 2011-2021 by Nadia Asparouhova.