NSF Plans to Supercharge FRO-style Independent Labs. We Spoke with the Scientists Who First Proposed the Idea.
Today, the Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships (TIP) of the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced its plan for an ambitious pilot Tech Labs program, a “new initiative designed to launch and scale a new generation of independent research organizations” for up to $1 billion. FAS CEO Daniel Correa recently spoke with Adam Marblestone and Sam Rodriques, former FAS fellows who developed the idea for FROs and advocated for their use in a 2020 policy memo. This conversation has been lightly edited.
Daniel Correa: In 2020, you both published the initial blueprint for Focused Research Organizations (FROs). A lot has changed since then. How far has this idea come in the years since?
Adam Marblestone: FROs are now a commonly discussed concept among scientists thinking about how to structure and fund new tools, systems, dataset or scientific infrastructure moonshots. This has arguably increased the level of ambition in the community and created more incentive to imagine and roadmap larger, more systematic and ambitious projects.
The high level of interest in FROs across many fields has shown us that they can help fill an important category of gap or bottleneck in the scientific landscape.
Convergent Research, a nonprofit incubator and parent organization for FROs, which I lead, has launched 10 FROs and counting in fields as diverse as brain mapping, non-model microbes, ocean carbon modeling, software for math, and faster-cheaper-better astronomy.
There are also other FROs that have emerged outside Convergent, such as Bind Research in the UK. Also in the UK, ARIA has funded Convergent to run a FRO residency, which will likely lead to 1-2 new UK based FROs in 2026. We are really excited to see the NSF announcement!
DC: What are some of the biggest successes?
AM: Early FROs are in full swing doing science.
They have released major datasets such as the largest map of the “pharm-ome” (drug target interactions) and a global atlas of ocean alkalinity enhancement efficiency.
They’ve published many preprints on new tools and methods, including new self-driving labs for DNA delivery to speed research in novel organisms and new approaches for capturing biological protocols for translation to robotics.
They’ve improved the cost-performance of proteomics by 27x already, and built software that has underpinned new industries like AI for math where there are now unicorn companies emerging partly as a result of these tools.
They’ve introduced new methods for brain circuit mapping that could help make mapping entire mammalian brains cost effective and put new neural interface devices in human studies with unprecedented speed and safety.
A small number of FROs have transitioned into new nonprofits as well, and we will also soon see the first major commercial spinouts of their technologies.
Perhaps most importantly, extremely talented scientists, engineers, operators and leaders have been joining FROs, proving that these distinct institutions can indeed attract and retain top talent. These people span a huge range of academic and industrial backgrounds and career stages. Much more top talent has reached out with interest in starting their own ambitious FROs. A lot of that top talent wants to work on big goals in a tight-knit, fast moving team setting.
In the process, more than 30 philanthropic organizations of many kinds, and several government organizations, have put funding into FROs at various stages.
DC: Let’s back up. Can you remind us about where the independent labs model is most potent – the kinds of applications where we should expect to see CEO-led, team-based, time-bound focused research will deliver breakthrough results? I’m talking about about those that are not properly incentivized by more traditional research structures. Infrastructural technologies that enable other research, for example. What else?
Sam Rodriques: As I covered in an overview of the private lab landscape, there are actually many kinds of independent labs, some focused and milestone driven like FROs, others more exploratory, and with many different sizes. FROs are one sub-type of this menagerie. (FutureHouse, for example, which I co-founded, is a private lab but is a bit different from a canonical FRO.)
This is also clear from IFP’s excellent X-Labs proposal.
“X02 X-Labs” sound a bit like how we see FROs: they are execution focused and develop well defined tools, systems, datasets or other products that can un-block progress in an entire field. Things like 100x cheaper proteomics for biology, or a verifiable programming language for expressing mathematics. These projects are too large and coordinated for the individual-focused incentive structures of academia, and require professional technical and operational staff all working together on the same system with tight engineering coordination. They function in many ways like deep tech startups, except with greater focus on public goods creation, longer timescales and a primary goal to accelerate R&D versus make money for investors.
But there are other kinds of proposed X-Labs that would be more like open ended institutes concentrating talent and resources on a broader problem area and generating more serendipitous discovery versus goal directed system building. This is more like the “X01 category” in the IFP X-Labs proposal.
There is also a need for meta-level organizations like Convergent Research which are more like “X03s”, they roadmap fields, identify and incubate promising teams to solve bottlenecks, and oversee and act as parent organizations or regrantors for a set of projects.
DC: It should be obvious, but is still important to note, that not everything should be an FRO. There is still a very key role for academic research and training, for startups and companies, for individual fellowship support, for ARPA style coordination, for other kinds of labs and institutes, and so on. The key is to have a diverse ecosystem containing many complementary strengths. In no way are FROs “better” than other mechanisms in any generic sense – they just fill one important category of gap in the system as it otherwise exists.
SR: There is also a very real sense in which the FRO model is still early in its evolution and still an experiment, or really many experiments.
DC: Despite all of the progress, federal support for independent lab models to date has been limited, though it’s been exciting to see their inclusion in America’s AI Action Plan from earlier this year. This week’s announcement suggests that’s changing. What role can federal funding play in the evolving ecosystem?
SR: Philanthropy has prototyped the model, and we are beginning to see federal support.
Federal support can change the game in a few ways, beyond the obvious but important aspects of capitalizing the emerging ecosystem at a larger scale to allow more to be done overall.
First, while philanthropic funding can be fast, federal funding can be more systematic and predictable. Rather than a somewhat ad hoc process of “match making” between goals, projects, teams and philanthropists, federal agencies can back broad open calls for FROs in specific areas or across fields. Clear backing to be made available at the end of an open and regimented selection process will ultimately drive creation of the highest quality FROs, providing predictability and clear timelines and milestones for all involved stakeholders.
Second, the convening power of the federal government is huge, which is important for setting up FROs from day one with top partnerships, scientific community input and scalable dissemination paths. We’d love to see FROs nucleated deliberately as a step on the way to larger government programs and projects, e.g., a technology development FRO could reduce the cost of key data collection for a subsequent federal data collection or foundational model training moonshots.
Federal agencies could also approach FROs programmatically, funding directed projects to remove not just one but many key bottlenecks to progress in an area systematically.
It would be great to see federal agencies back not only individual FROs, but also some FRO creation and support organizations, in line with the idea of “X03s” in the X-Labs proposal.
DC: Any advice for NSF and other federal agencies hoping to play a catalytic role? What kinds of funding and support can the federal government most usefully provide? How much of a culture change will this require for funders who typically operate on a peer-review, hypothesis and publication-centric model?
AM: Convergent has learned that the role of the “X03 style” meta level organizations can be a potent one. It provides operational support, stable and experienced governance, best practices, and a strong community of other FROs, among other things. New potential FROs don’t have to do it on their own. They can work with others who have done it before to help get started and to manage change.
Convergent recently published some “field notes” on learnings from running an incubator and parent organization that has launched many of the early FROs.
Tactical learnings include the importance of balancing specificity and flexibility in internal and funder facing milestones; the dynamic nature of startup-like founding teams and the benefits of good governance structures; the importance of having a scaled revolution in mind beyond the FRO itself with a strong theory of change for transformation of an entire field; the need for executive coaching for project leads, and so on.
FROs are what would typically be called “high risk, high reward” projects (although we think this terminology has some conceptual problems), and they should not be designed by committee nor can risk be eliminated from them. “Empowered program manager” models could potentially be helpful in implementing FRO programs to get at sharp, non-consensus ideas and people. But we have in fact extensively peer reviewed all of Convergent’s FROs and received valuable input in the process – the question is how peer review feedback is used and whether the peer reviewers and program officers understand the nature of these ambitious and radical projects.
Certainly this requires going beyond what we currently think of as the standard hypothesis driven research funding model. FROs aim for broad technological enablement of entire fields, allowing more rapid search through wide spaces of hypotheses, rather than answering narrow or incremental questions. We’ve tried to illustrate this broad category with the Convergent “Gap Map” where we summarized conversations with many scientists into an incomplete and preliminary list of potential opportunity areas for this kind of project.
Traditional journal publication is probably too slow a mechanism to be integral to a FRO lifecycle during its active sprint. FROs are using preprints and other forms of dissemination a lot in practice, to get things moving and out there faster.
DC: NSF’s Tech Labs announcement contemplates a variety of potential applications. Do you have any reflections on where NSF’s support could be most useful?
SR: There are a lot of efforts to drive commercialization and entrepreneurship. A FRO mechanism should allow maximum catalysis of a field through advanced research and technology, even if that is deeply pre-commercial or open source and public goods focused. That will likely be most distinct from what the private sector is doing well already.
DC: Any advice you’d give to someone hoping to start one of these independent team-based science organizations, such as mistakes to avoid?
AM: Try to be as concrete as possible about what you’ll build, and about the theory of change for how that will be used – a very clear North Star. Don’t just propose to solve a general area, investigate a question or form a strong collaboration. What will you build? Why is it massively and disruptively better than the state of the art? How will this reach at scale adoption and ultimately drive profound and otherwise unachievable transformation?
Carve out the FRO shaped problem. If it can be done in an existing institution, just with more money, it probably isn’t a FRO. If it is too broad, it probably isn’t either.
Think about creating a well rounded founding team with scientific, technological, management and other expertise. Don’t come in with too many presumptions about exactly what the roles will be within it as the team gels. There will be a lot of entrepreneurial learning at the individual and group levels.
Importantly, make sure everyone on your founding team has absolute clarity about what the North Star of the project is and is “all in” on the endeavor. It’s a big commitment. Don’t dilute the concept by making it generic, and make sure what you’re proposing has the potential to be as disruptive as, say, next-generation sequencing was for biology or the ImageNet dataset was for deep learning.
And consider reaching out to others who have started to pursue the FRO path.
SR: From my perspective, the most important thing is that the form of the organization must be derived from the organization’s mission. When we wrote down the FRO proposal originally, we enumerated some best practices, such as the notion that FROs should be funded for 5 years up-front, and that they should spin down or spin out at that point. These are good general guidelines that are useful for funders to orient around. However, founders need to figure out what works for them and their mission: if your mission is going to take three years or seven years, that’s fine. If your mission requires three separate projects rather than a single unified effort, also fine. Funders should have flexibility to adapt their funding to the needs of the project.
Another common failure mode I observe among FRO founders is the notion that the alternative form of funding that FROs receive means that they can just put their heads down and focus on research, rather than worrying about publishing their results, fundraising, or so on. I strenuously disagree with this. FROs should publish early and often, and should engage regularly with funders, even when they do not immediately need funding. Publishing your work and talking to funders are two ways you get feedback on the work you’re doing. The faster you get feedback, the more quickly you can iterate to higher quality.
Finally, FROs are indeed closely inspired by startups. You should learn about and consider all of the standard advice given to startup founders. Iterate quickly. Remember that execution is virtually always more important than concept. And, in particular: avoid big egos on your team. They are very challenging to manage, and are also very challenging when it comes to building team cohesion. This is especially important advice for FRO founders who may come from and have strong ties to academia, which is sometimes home to big egos.
Create new FROs to tackle scientific and technological challenges that can’t be efficiently addressed by existing organizational structures.
The ‘FRO-casting’ challenge is open to subject matter experts, scientists, forecasters, decision makers, and the public. It is free to participate.