Atlas of Innovation

Academic fieldbuilding involves strategic investments to develop new scholarly disciplines or strengthen emerging research areas within universities. This can include funding new faculty positions, creating research centers, establishing graduate training programs, supporting conferences and journals, and providing seed grants to attract researchers to a nascent field. The goal is to build sustained academic capacity in areas important for future innovation.

The growth of computer science as an academic discipline illustrates successful fieldbuilding. Through sustained investment from agencies like DARPA and NSF, what began as a scattered collection of researchers became a major academic field with departments at every research university. This infrastructure now produces the talent and knowledge that powers the technology industry.

Academic fieldbuilding works best when you want to create long-term research capacity in an area, when universities are the appropriate home for the expertise you want to develop, and when you can commit to sustained investment over many years. It’s a slow but powerful approach—building a field takes a decade or more, but successful fields can produce returns for generations through the researchers they train and the knowledge they create.

Definition

Fieldbuilding refers to structured efforts to create or strengthen entire disciplines, sectors, or professional ecosystems by training new talent, creating resources, and building legitimacy. To these ends, funders may employ various strategies, including hosting networking events, generating media interest, awarding recognition prizes, and supporting scholarship and apprenticeship programs.

Fieldbuilding can occur in academic settings with a focus on research and education, or in non-academic settings, such as industries and governments, where the focus is placed on applied capabilities and workforce development.

Why might fieldbuilding be the right funding approach?

Fieldbuilding is well-suited to innovation challenges that lack mature infrastructure or institutions. It supports long-term progress by creating foundational capacity, fostering collaboration, and training new talent. This approach is particularly valuable when conventional funding mechanisms fall short due to coordination failures, talent shortages, or an absence of shared resources.

Compared to other funding mechanisms, fieldbuilding is especially effective at the following activities:

Filling early-stage talent gaps: Supporting scholarships, fellowships, and mentorship programs can help attract early-career individuals and train new scientists, engineers, or professionals in emerging areas. For example, in the US, federal funding of STEM PhD programs directly expands the talent pipeline. Research shows that an increase in US government funding for STEM PhD training yields a roughly equal, one-to-one rise in the number of graduates.
Breaking silos: When expertise exists but is fragmented across disciplines, sectors, or geographies, fieldbuilding can help break down these barriers. Networking events, collaborative research programs, and shared infrastructure enable faster and stronger coordination.
Addressing coordination failures: Emerging fields may lack essential public goods, such as shared datasets and standards, making research more costly and duplicative. Fieldbuilding can fund these kinds of shared platforms.

Academic and Non-Academic Fieldbuilding Fieldbuilding can occur in academic and non-academic settings, or a hybrid of the two, all of which differ in both culture and structure. Academic fieldbuilding tends to prioritize the creation of foundational knowledge, disciplinary legitimacy, and long-term academic researcher pipelines. It often builds slowly through multi-decade investments in training programs, dedicated journals, and research infrastructure, making it well-suited for fields requiring sustained investigation or fundamental discoveries. Non-academic fieldbuilding focuses on rapidly mobilizing applied talent, shared infrastructure, and industry standards to support commercial or operational goals. It uses tools like accelerators, professional licensing, apprenticeships, and shared technical standards to tackle industry-relevant barriers and coordinate across competing organizations.

What can go wrong?

Fieldbuilding is complex and long-term, with several critical risks funders should anticipate:

Measurement difficulties: Fieldbuilding outcomes often unfold over decades, and early metrics of success (e.g., number of trained individuals or citations) may not correlate with long-term innovation or impact. This unpredictability makes it challenging to measure return on investment.
Risk of stagnation or misdirection: Poorly defined goals can lead to supporting fields that either stagnate due to overly narrow definitions or evolve in directions misaligned with societal needs.
Market resource mismatch: Building a field without simultaneously developing downstream industries or applications risks wasting talent and resources.
Coordination and governance challenges: Small or nascent fields may face challenges such as conflicts of interest and limited representation. In certain industry contexts, fostering cooperation may inadvertently lead to anti-competitive behavior, such as using new trade organizations to facilitate collusion or create entry barriers for new competitors.
Insufficient time horizons: Recruiting talent, fostering ecosystems, and building institutional infrastructure can take years to decades.

To help mitigate these risks, funders can define success criteria early, conduct regular program reviews to adapt to evolving challenges, and maintain open participation across disciplines and institutions to avoid insularity or groupthink.

Examples

Fieldbuilding can occur in academic, non-academic, or hybrid settings, each with distinct structures for building expertise and disseminating ideas:

Interdisciplinary Materials Research: In the early 1960s, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) funded Interdisciplinary Laboratories (IDLs) at several leading universities to expand the field of materials science. At the time, military technologies were advancing faster than the science of materials on which the technologies were built. IDLs paired research funding and student training with the creation of new centers to increase talent and encourage collaboration across physics, chemistry, and mechanical engineering. IDLs produced a pipeline of PhDs and lasting institutional capacity, seeding major breakthroughs in semiconductors and advanced alloys for aerospace and automotive applications.
Semiconductor Research Corporation: The Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) formed in the 1980s as a consortium linking semiconductor companies, academic researchers, and government funders. It targeted shared technical challenges like miniaturization and manufacturability. By funding universities while fostering collaboration between industry engineers and academic scientists, SRC built workforce pipelines and made technical advances that fueled industry growth. SRC spending attracted additional support from universities and other partners, with some assessments placing follow-on support at two to three dollars for every dollar invested by SRC. The model pioneered successful industry fieldbuilding collaborations, including leading to advances critical to modern computing.
Manne Economics Institute for Federal Judges: In 1976, the Manne Economics Institute for Federal Judges launched a program to introduce federal judges to key economics concepts through two-week courses taught primarily by academic economists. Topics included cost-benefit analysis, expected value, and market failures. By the 1990s, nearly half of all federal judges had attended the program. Research shows that participants went on to use more language from economics in their opinions, and that judges’ rulings and sentencing patterns shifted. The program illustrates how targeted training can create lasting connections between disciplines, translating ideas from academia into the daily practice of law.

Fieldbuilding can also occur through less formal approaches, such as online forums and local communities:

Technical community local meetups: Individuals often organize informal gatherings to discuss technical topics. In San Francisco, casual meetups for the Ruby programming language brought together some of the future GitHub cofounders.

Policymakers often pair or amplify fieldbuilding with other innovation funding mechanisms:

[[Prizes]]: Within fieldbuilding, funders can use field recognition prizes to boost visibility and recruit talent by showcasing prestigious technical wins. Other prizes, based on reaching pre-defined technical targets, can also kickstart innovation and draw the attention of more talent. Both fieldbuilding and prizes make sense when a funder does not have a specific team in mind. Prizes are better suited than fieldbuilding when funders want to shift effort toward a target or emerging area by defining the goal itself, not by funding institutions to cultivate the surrounding ecosystem.
[[Coordinated research programs]]: Like field-building, coordinated research programs aim to shape a research domain. Field-building does this through open and diffuse efforts such as training and convenings. Coordinated research programs shape research through a dedicated program manager who focuses funding on specific research priorities.

Definition

Why might fieldbuilding be the right funding approach?

What can go wrong?

Examples

Related funding approaches