Academic discipline: Innovation policy, systems engineering, evolutionary economics, complexity science, data science, operations research

Methods: Graph theory, citation networks, tech mining, machine learning 

Research question: How do scientific funders coordinate in the long term? 

Description: RD&D funding entities, either explicitly or implicitly, make decisions about which technological maturity to operate at. For instance, it is widely believed that large-scale, “diffusion-oriented” agencies such as the UKRI and NIH favour basic research while firms and other smaller specialist agencies support innovation in the downstream. There is little analysis of the way in which support of innovation is distributed over time, and over entities. 

Implications: Measuring the technological maturities that funders intrinsically operate at quantifies the intrinsic “division of labour” across entities. This understanding is particularly important in structure mission-oriented innovations which involve maturing nascent concepts/technologies towards clear technical goals across multiple agencies.