20 hours ago
- The essay proposes a taxonomy of R&D organizations with nine key parameters: project timelines, user input, discretionary funding, career incentives and talent models, revenue strategy, mission focus, organization size, governance and project selection, and openness and IP strategy.
- Many historical R&D successes (e.g., Bell Labs, DARPA, HHMI) used novel organizational structures that combined specific parameter values to enable breakthroughs.
- Current philanthropic efforts are creating new research organizations, but the full possibility space of organizational designs remains largely unexplored.
- Each parameter interacts with others, and identifying gaps in the parameter space could lead to new effective structures for tackling unsolved scientific problems.