A project of the Institute for Progress and Market Shaping Accelerator
About the Atlas
It’s often easier to know what you want to happen — finding a new treatment for a disease, scaling the production of a new breakthrough — than how to make it happen. Ambitious innovation goals like these require the right funding approaches. For funders of innovation, picking a different funding mechanism can radically reshape what gets invented, how quickly, and at what cost.
The Atlas of Innovation is a tool that builds on decades of academic research to help policymakers and philanthropic funders navigate the how of innovation funding.
The Atlas begins with three core questions about your innovation goal:
- How well-defined is the problem?
- What does a solution look like?
- Which team is best positioned to solve it?
Your answers to questions about your innovation goal bring you to one of 13 funding approaches in the innovation library, explaining when the approach works well and how it can fail.
Crucially, the Atlas is not intended to pinpoint the single correct answer. Its value lies in making the landscape of funding approaches and their tradeoffs legible, giving policymakers and philanthropic program officers a structured way to understand the options, and, perhaps, revisit decisions as their thinking evolves.
The economics research behind the Atlas was presented at the 2026 NBER Entrepreneurship and Innovation Policy and the Economy Conference and appears in the accompanying volume.
Please let us know if the Atlas informed your program design: atlas@ifp.org and contact@marketshapingaccelerator.org.
To engage with the content of the Atlas of Innovation via an LLM, download a skill folder here.
Contributions
The Atlas of Innovation is a project of the Institute for Progress and the Market Shaping Accelerator. Led by Matthew Esche and Caleb Watney. Core contributions by Sarrin Chethik, Claire McMahon, Siddhartha Haria, Christopher Snyder, Matthew Clancy, and Heidi Williams. Illustrations by R. Kikuo Johnson. Creative direction by Beez Africa. Design by Emma Steinhobel. Web development and design by joodaloop. Web technical direction by Ben Murphy. Edited by Eamonn Ives, Hewson Duffy, Joseph Fridman, and Santi Ruiz.
Acknowledgements
We thank the following individuals for helpful feedback that improved the Atlas of Innovation: Rachel Bonniefield, Kevin Bryan, Jordan Dworkin, Ina Ganguli, Eric Gilliam, Daniel Gross, Jenn Gustetic, Rachel Griffith, Sabrina Howell, Jenny Kudymowa, Michael Kremer, Greg Lewis, Kyle Myers, Nirupama Rao, Nan Ransohoff, Ben Reinhardt, Adam Russell, Bhaven Sampat, Tim Simcoe, Narayan Subramanian, Misha Teplitskiy, Brian Silverman, Dan Turner-Evans, and Andrew Gerard.
IFP and MSA thank the Smith Richardson Foundation and the Sijbrandij Foundation for their support of this project.