About

The team at Convergent Research created this database to shine a light on a critical (but underrepresented) category of scientific work: projects that don’t fit neatly into the traditional “R” or “D” of R&D, but that are essential for accelerating progress across entire fields. We call these fundamental development projects. They are efforts to remove key R&D gaps by building foundational capabilities through coordinated research programs. We believe that these are the kinds of enabling infrastructure that, if they existed, would unlock radically faster scientific discovery. Learn more about our thinking behind this here.

Funding Opportunities

Convergent Research actively seeks to engage with ambitious funders interested in exploring mission-aligned ways to partner with us in our work.

Over the last four years, we’ve secured more than $300 million in funding from 30-plus individuals and institutions for the Search, Incubation, and Launch of 10 bridge-scale projects. And we’d welcome the opportunity to discuss how you’d like to play a role in removing key bottlenecks and accelerating beneficial science and technology.

Email sarah@convergentresearch.org to connect with our team.

What you’ll find here

This interactive database maps, on one hand, a landscape of R&D gaps and, on the other, the foundational capabilities that we believe would be highly catalytic in addressing them. It spans 20 scientific fields and draws on hundreds of conversations with scientists, technologists, and organization builders.

This is not by any means a comprehensive survey or prioritized roadmap!  Consider it an illustrative tool intended to spark ideas and conversation around what needs building.

In the database, foundational capabilities are thematically organized by which broad R&D gap, or bottleneck, they address.

For each foundational capability, we’ve highlighted an inevitably incomplete selection of relevant efforts, research, and ideas to achieve it including:

  • Active entities: FROs, companies, organizations (nonprofits and research institutions) and initiatives working to develop these capabilities
  • Funding programs: Granting programs, competitions, and other funding mechanisms
  • Scientific literature: Reviews, papers, and studies that advance or benchmark the science
  • Roadmaps: outlining paths toward capability development
  • Whitepapers/ Ideas: Essays, opinion pieces, proposals, podcasts, and other speculative or descriptive content
  • Technology seeds: Publications and patents of prototype or proof-of-concept technologies that may need further development or scaling
  • Individuals: Researchers, engineers, and project initiators working to launch or advocate for bridge-scale efforts

How to use this

  • Browse by field, gap, or keyword
  • Explore the graph view
  • Read through foundational capabilities and see what’s being done and, conversely, what’s missing
  • Share and discuss ideas with your research community
  • Use it as a launchpad to organize a workshop or roadmapping exercise

Help Improve it

We want this project to improve over time and welcome your contributions and suggestions. In the future, we hope to introduce additional attributes to help orient users to the urgency or potential impact of solving particular gaps.

  • Add new gaps, potential solutions, or relevant efforts by filling out this form
  • Suggest changes to how the database is presented
  • Collaborate: we’re open to partners interested in meta analyses, and new tools that make the data more actionable.

Questions or suggestions? Email gapmap@convergentresearch.org.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the entire Convergent Research team and the many external individuals who contributed their feedback and ideas to this project! If we missed your name, please let us know.

Matthew Akamatsu, Ben Blaiszik, Megan Blewett, Beck Brachman, Keith Brown, Steve Byrnes, George Church, Allegra Cohen, Eric Drexler, Ales Flidr, Lauren Gilbert, Spencer Greenberg, Victor Greiff, Casey Handmer, Sam Holton, Martin Borch Jensen, Tom Kalil, Edwin Kite, Konrad Kording, Tony Kulesa, Eirini Malliaraki, Patrick Mineault, Evan Miyazono, Anand Muthusamy, Manjari Narayan, Michael Nielsen, Daniel Oran, David Pfau, Dan Recht, Ben Reinhardt, Jeffrey Shainline, Sean Simonini, Nikolai Slavov, Ronen Tamari, Aaron Tohuvavohu, Brian Wang, Nicole Wheeler, Brad Zamft.

And thanks to the team that helped us implement the database and portal and get it off the ground: Christina Agapakis, Murray Cox, Matt Tranzillo.

Our appreciation to the creators of the fantastic Frontier Climate Carbon Removal Knowledge Gaps database, which served as inspiration for database design.

About Convergent Research

Convergent Research brings together scientific founders and funders to design, launch and operate Focused Research Organizations (FROs) to tackle large-scale, tightly coordinated, non-profit projects. Our FROs are building pivotal infrastructure that removes bottlenecks to breakthrough scientific research, proving out a new operating model for science that enables a high level of team science and systems engineering for public goods creation.