What can science funders like Sloan do differently to produce more scientific breakthroughs? There is consensus among scientists, for example, that funders do not take enough risks and that grant-seeking is so unduly onerous that it can distort their incentives. Are they correct? What difference does it make? Economists are not only working to find out, but also to devise and test new mechanisms that can improve grant-making. The results get better when economists, scientists, and science funders all interact before, during, and after these studies take place. To accomplish that, there are few places better than the Science of Science Funding (SoSF) meetings at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Summer Institute, which attracts participants from major private funding institutions, government funding agencies, and organizations like USPTO, the U.S. Census Bureau, Science Magazine, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Co-PIs Reinhilde Veugelers and Megan MacGarvie will lead the next phase of SoSF, with goals that include: promoting a more focused research agenda; strengthening ties between economists and the institutions they study; and engaging more graduate students and early-career faculty in the community. They will organize more than half a dozen meetings over the next three years, including annual sessions at the NBER Summer Institute, annual NBER meetings on the Scientific Workforce, and a stand-alone “stock-taking” conference for science funders. Proceedings from this major conference will be published as a curated volume designed to make widely accessible the key results and open questions from the economics of science funding literature to date. The PIs will also lead site visits to scientific research facilities, organize workshops and dissertation feedback sessions for PhD students, and establish a small travel grants program to enable early-career researchers to visit the scientific organizations or science funders they intend to study

The Innovation Growth Lab (IGL) is a global collaboration that enables, supports, undertakes, and disseminates experimental research about the design of programs and institutions for promoting economic growth through innovation. Since 2014, IGL has launched more than 70 field experiments in 28 countries with the cooperation of more than 35 government agencies. Rigorous findings so far concern everything from the effectiveness of “innovation vouchers” for small and medium businesses to the importance of role models in promoting diversity among entrepreneurs. In the U.S., partners like the Economic Development Administration, Small Business Administration, and NASA have begun working with IGL to meet their obligations under the bipartisan Foundations of Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018.Over the next three years, IGL’s new initiatives will both strengthening such connections in the United States specifically, as well as providing even more services and activities to support the global community of experimentalists studying science, innovation, entrepreneurship, and economic growth. A major IGL undertaking will be to take over the organization of the Conference on Field Experiments in Strategy (CFXS), an annual and significant conference that attracts more than 350 leading scholars from all over the world.Plans include the addition of special workshops and seed grants for the many PhD candidates and early career scholars who attend CFXS in search of help with conducting their first field experiments. Randomized Controlled Trials can be particularly challenging to design and administer. Because they are often large-scale, time consuming, and expensive, too, nobody wants to discover in the middle of running such an experiment that they forgot about some crucial consideration or variable. That is one of the reasons why the work of organizations like IGL is so valuable.