The Atlas of Innovation is a project of IFP
Non-Academic Fieldbuilding
Developing expertise and professional communities outside universities, in industry, government, nonprofits, or new institutions.
Non-academic fieldbuilding develops expertise and professional communities outside traditional university settings. This might involve supporting industry research groups, creating new nonprofit research organizations, building capacity within government agencies, or establishing entirely new institutions. Some problems are better addressed outside academia due to the need for applied focus, operational scale, or different incentive structures.
The growth of the AI safety research community illustrates non-academic fieldbuilding. Organizations like OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind—along with nonprofits like MIRI and the Center for Human-Compatible AI—have built significant research capacity outside traditional academic structures. These organizations can attract talent with competitive salaries, focus intensively on applied problems, and operate at scales difficult to achieve in university settings.
Non-academic fieldbuilding works best when the expertise you want to develop doesn’t fit well in academic structures, when you need to attract talent that academic salaries can’t match, when applied or operational work is more important than publication, or when you want to create new institutional models. The challenge is that new institutions lack the stability and legitimacy of established universities.