Scientific productivity
Ideas are getting harder to find. Reverse the decline in research productivity per dollar.
The scale of it
x more researchers needed to sustain Moore’s-law progress vs the 1970s
The capital on it
Capital aimed at improving how science itself works: FROs, metascience, research tooling, funding-mechanism experiments. Excludes ordinary global R&D (~$2.5T/yr) — the meta-layer steering that ocean is ~0.02% of it.
source: Metascience & FRO funder commitments — Convergent Research, Astera, Renaissance Philanthropy (public figures, estimate) · confidence low · estimate, improvable by PR
The prize at the limit
The company that 10x the rate of scientific discovery becomes the picks-and-shovels layer under every other breakthrough — drugs, materials, energy. It taxes all downstream progress, which is why the ceiling rivals the largest infrastructure firms.
comparable: a research-infrastructure monopoly (TSMC-of-science) · confidence low · a ceiling, not a forecast
The trade: demand is high, only $400M/yr of capital is flowing (0.005× its fair share), and the prize at the limit is $1T. This is a Request for Startups and a Request for Investors at once.
The summary lives here. The full whitepaper walks through the four-axis ranking, existing alternatives, proposed direction, cost & scale, and suggested investors — in the spirit of Hyperloop Alpha.
Quantity · humans affected
source: estimated, scientific productivity compounds across every domain
Severity · WTP / wealth
share of affected person’s wealth they would pay for a solution
Current solutions
quality of existing solutions — low score = high opportunity
Market size · TAM
USD / year the world is already paying
Time · OOM to impact
order-of-magnitude horizon to civilizational-scale impact
Capital · OOM to solve
cumulative R&D + deployment + supply chain across the arc
Priority score
9
importance × urgency, 0–100
Importance
10
humans affected × severity, gated by market
Urgency
90
direction of travel + solution gap
Neglectedness
6/10Metascience (studying and fixing how science works) is a tiny field relative to the trillions in R&D it could make more productive.
medTractability
5/10Concrete experiments exist: Focused Research Organizations, fast-grant programs, and AI-driven autonomous labs.
medWays to help
Build autonomous labs, replication infrastructure, or fast-grant rails.
Work in metascience: measure and fix the bottlenecks in how science gets funded and done.
Organizations
- Convergent ResearchFRO incubator
- Institute for Progresspolicy
People to follow
- Patrick Collisonco-founder, Stripe & Arc Institute
- Heidi Williamseconomist of innovation
Three-lens scoring
Bloom, Jones, Van Reenen and Webb showed research productivity across semiconductors, agriculture, and biomedicine has been falling for decades, we spend far more scientist-hours for each new idea. The meta-problem: every other quest on this list depends on scientific throughput. Focused Research Organizations, AI-assisted research, metascience reform, and funding structure changes all compound across every domain.
The success vision · 20 years horizon
If we solve this, here is the world we get.
Before · today
Per-researcher productivity declining for 50+ years (BTGD). Most grant time spent on paperwork. Replication crisis unresolved. New PhDs needed to maintain Moore’s-law-style progress doubling every ~7 years.
After · 20 years
Scientific output per dollar 10× higher via automated experiments, AI literature review, FROs, lottery + fast-grants reform. Trustworthy literature. New disciplines created on AI timescales.
Voices on this quest
5 thinkersProgress depends on the unhindered creation of good explanations. Institutions that reward criticism outperform those that reward consensus.
The Beginning of Infinity, multiple chapters
First-principles reasoning beats reasoning by analogy. Most industries are throttled by process, not physics. The idiot-index gap is where opportunities live.
Public interviews; Walter Isaacson biography (2023)
“Progress itself is understudied. By "progress," we mean the combination of economic, technological, scientific, cultural, and organizational advancement that has transformed our lives and raised standards of living over the past couple of centuries.”
Research productivity has been falling for decades and we under-study the process of progress itself. Metascience and institution design matter as much as any single discovery.
We need a new philosophy of progress that makes technological and scientific advancement a positive cultural project again, not something to apologize for.
The Great Stagnation thesis: since roughly 1973 the low-hanging fruit of science and industry has been picked. Restoring the innovation engine is the meta-problem.
The Great Stagnation (2011)
Companies on this quest
9 mappedOriginally nonprofit research lab, now capped-profit. Safety and superalignment teams alongside capabilities work.
Browser-based coding platform. 100M+ learners worldwide; AI agent for app-building compresses learn-to-ship cycle.
ML-driven drug discovery from Daphne Koller. Combines stem-cell biology with deep learning.
AI-driven drug discovery. Industrializes biology through automated phenotypic screening at scale.
Cell programming platform. Biosecurity Division runs metagenomic surveillance and pathogen detection at scale.
Fully automated precision-parts factories for aerospace, defense, and infrastructure. Removing labor cost from the BOM.
Focused Research Organization for complex human disease. Funding structure designed to outrun the NIH grant cycle.
Incubates Focused Research Organizations (FROs), Cultivarium, E11, LemonBay, tackling neglected-by-structure science.
Alphabet-spinoff applying AlphaFold-class ML to drug design. Deals with Novartis and Eli Lilly.
Capital funding this quest
8 allocatorsEmergent Ventures
GrantFast grants. High-variance, unconventional, talent-first.
best for: Unproven people with a weird, specific idea and no credential path.
Thiel Fellowship
Fellowship$100k to stop out of school and build something important.
best for: Under-22 builders with spiky talent and a real project.
O'Shaughnessy Fellowships
Fellowship$100k for creators across domains, art, science, history, startups.
best for: Agency-specific builders whose project does not fit a discipline box.
Activate Fellowship
AcceleratorTwo-year salary and national-lab access for scientists taking PhD research to market.
best for: Technical founders who need time and lab equipment, not just cash.
Speculative Technologies
Focused Research OrgARPA-style coordinated research programs for big-if-true platform tech.
best for: Research areas that are not yet startups but could unlock whole fields.
Deep Science Ventures
Venture StudioOutcome-first venture creation. Define the holy-grail outcome, then recruit founders.
best for: Founders who want a co-founder thesis and institutional support from day one.
Lux Capital
Venture CapitalCounter-conventional science at the edges of physics and biology.
best for: Technical founders at the frontier who need contrarian conviction capital.
Fifty Years
Venture CapitalEvery portfolio company must solve a UN SDG. Profit with purpose, no exceptions.
best for: Mission-aligned technical founders who want to marry returns and impact.
Writing about this right now
full feed →- essayRoots of Progress · Jason Crawford1y ago
The case for progress as a moral imperative
Material progress is not just nice-to-have. It is the precondition for nearly every flourishing humans care about.
- essayMarginal Revolution · Cowen & Tabarrok2y ago
Are ideas really getting harder to find?
Cowen revisits Bloom-Jones-Reenen-Webb and considers the case for institutional rather than purely cognitive bottlenecks.