EAGER Germination: A Seed-Funding and Analytics Platform for High-Risk/High-Impact Research

University Of Chicago, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

This award will develop a novel online seed funding and analytics platform at the University of Chicago designed to identify and benefit early and mid-career faculty who want to engage in transformative research. This system will provide (1) easy access to a variety of internal seed funding opportunities, which often reward early-stage, risky research; (2) use proprietary algorithms to match PIs to potential collaborators, research tools, and significant external funding opportunities; and (3) include metrics to track long-term societal and scientific value generated by such research. The platform will provide a comprehensive set of institutional, financial, collegiate, and intellectual incentives for faculty to engage with creative research agendas that could have a transformative impact. It will integrate cutting-edge technology with social incentives to identify big opportunities and form novel collaborations across diverse fields, accelerate the pace of research, and measure the academic and financial impact of emergent research. Most importantly, it will track the societal impact metrics of such research for years to come and elevate its importance in the academic community. The seed-funding and analytics platform will serve as a proof-of-concept and initial data-collection for systematizing and tracking the scientific and societal impact of early-stage, transformative research ideas. The platform can then be replicated at other universities to foster the environment of research innovation with broad impact that will be accessible to scientists, university administrators, funders at the private (foundations and donors) as well as federal level (federal agencies), and the public at large. It will allow research institutions and funders to quantify the impact of transformative ideas on pressing societal issues.