NSF Backing New Engines of Growth

In January 2024, the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced the 10 winners of a first-ever program that expands its traditional remit of backing fundamental research. Titled Regional Innovation Engines and inaugurated in late 2023, the program goes beyond supporting technologies with definite commercial potential. It also aims to broaden the distribution of NSF funds, reversing a trend that has seen states with highly ranked universities obtain a significant proportion of the agency’s grants. The agency also intends the program to focus on areas of technology that typically fall under the radar of significant grants for innovative research with commercial potential.

“The inaugural NSF Engines awards demonstrate our enduring commitment to create opportunity everywhere and enable innovation anywhere,” said NSF director Sethuraman Panchanathan in announcing the program. “Through these NSF Engines, NSF aims to expand the frontiers of technology and innovation and spur economic growth across the nation through unprecedented inv­est­ments in people and partnerships.” That commitment goes beyond producing ideas with commercial potential in new regions. It aims to give young scientists and engineers in those regions the training appropriate to developing and exp­loiting the ideas.

A key aspect of the program is its effort to remedy an often-criticized aspect of NSF spending over the decades since its founding in 1950: the restricted geographical destinations of its funding. At present, just six states—California, Mas­sachusetts, Michigan, New York, Penn­sylvania, and Washington—receive 40 percent of the agency’s annual $10 billion budget. Not surprisingly, those states contain several of the country’s most prominent and notable research universities. But Stanford, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania aren’t the only academic organizations that offer top-notch science and engineering departments able to attract the brightest students for doctoral programs and postdoctoral research positions and offer opportunities for commercializing the results of their findings. Nor are artificial intelligence (AI), biotechnology, and green energy production the only fields that can benefit from collaborations among academe, industry, and nonprofits. NSF expects the regional innovation engines to open up new centers of various types of technology throughout the country. “The program seeks to catalyze and foster innova­tion ecosystems across the United States,” the NSF put it in an announcement of the program.

The Engines program stems from the CHIPS and Science Act that President Joe Biden signed in 2022. It has three fundamental goals. First, it sets out to boost American innovative capacity. The program aims to achieve that by increasing the amount of commercial investment in R&D, particularly in geographic regions that have not participated fully in the technology boom of the past few years. That process will serve to develop global leaders in subject areas of critical value for the US. It also intends, as an NSF brochure notes, to “embed a culture of innovation and inclusion within participating organizations.” Second, NSF has designed the program to create what officials call “sustainable innovation ecosystems.” Those will stem from the creation of partnership networks—involving corporations, universities, and other contributors—that will, among them, create pathways for the growth of innovation systems on a regional basis.

Beyond that, the program is intended to demonstrate inclusivity—geographic, economic, organizational, and educational—in furthering economic growth. To achieve that, NSF leaders promise, it will “harness the nation’s geography of innovation by engaging all those interested in science and engineering research and innovation, regardless of their backgrounds, organizational affiliations, or geographic locations.” Thus, the program will train and educate diverse technicians, researchers, practitioners, and entrepreneurs based on specific regions’ needs for workers. Such actions should help to develop thriving companies that will focus on emerging technologies in regions that haven’t typically developed high-tech expertise. By focusing on parts of the country that have not had such facilities in the past, the agency seeks to reach several subsidiary goals:

• Advancing critical technologies, such as semiconductors, AI, advanced wireless, and biotechnology;

• Meeting pressing national and societal challenges;

• Cultivating partnerships among industry, academia, government, nonprofits, civil society, and communities of practice;

• Promoting and stimulating economic growth and job creation; and

• Spurring regional innovation and talent.

The program isn’t the first NSF effort to balance opportunities among traditi­onally well-supported and less-supported states. The agency created what it calls the Established Program to Stimulate Com­petitive Research (EPSCoR) more than four decades ago. EPSCoR has provided small grants to 25 states mostly in the lower half of the agency’s recipients. However, the NSF has little evidence to suggest that the program has achieved its goal of reducing the gap between technologically poorer and richer states in terms of results.

The Regional Innovation Engines program aims to change the odds in two more expansive ways: geographical and financial. Rather than offering grants to single states, the program sets out to stimulate innovation and the growth it offers in what the NSF calls “regions of service.” These consist of metropolitan areas and adjacent rural areas. But member areas of individual regions aren’t necessarily contiguous. Nor is membership of a region restricted to the borders of a single state. One consortium, for example, combines teams in Colorado and Wyoming in a program to develop technologies for climate resilience. Another involves Illinois, Ohio, and Wisconsin in innovative studies of the Great Lakes. Groups in Arizona, Nevada, and Utah will collaborate on water sustainability. And the North Carolina Textile Innovation and Sustainability Engine covers parts of South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia, in addition to its center in Western North Carolina. Overall, the 10 teams receiving the program’s first awards span 18 states.

The financial difference involves the size and duration of those awards. Each of the 10 inaugural engine teams will receive an initial grant of $15 million for its first two years. If all goes well, that amount will ramp up to $160 million over the next decade. Throughout the process, NSF Managers assert, each Engine will train and develop its local workforce and grow its regional char­acter.

Two of the first Engines illustrate the program’s support for technologies that might otherwise be neglected. North Carolina’s Engine will aim to revolutionize the $96 billion, four-state industry centered on the Tarheel State’s “textile belt.” Led by The Industrial Commons, an organization that founds industrial cooperatives, it seeks to advance environmentally sustainable textiles. That will involve developing smart textiles and wearable technology, reducing ­outputs of carbon and the number of textiles in landfills, and “nurturing the development of new product lines that use ­circular methods.” The North Dak­ota Advanced Agriculture Technology Engine, by contrast, involves only one state. But it covers the entirety of the Peace Garden State; 90 percent of North Dakota consists of farms and ranch lands. Its Engine, led by North Dakota State University, will focus on the creation of resilient and secure food systems. Adv­anced genomics, climate modelling, nano­scale sensors, and computer networks will provide means of monitoring and improving the growth of crops ­state­wide. Networks of stakeholders, including tribal, rural, and farming com­mun­ities, will collaborate in the process of developing a blueprint for the state’s agricultural future.

Those two Engines and the other eight initial awardees emerged from a competition among 44 teams. But they aren’t the only potential winners of the process. NSF chose 34 teams as semi-­finalists; 16 of them qualified as finalists. The agency has invited a subset of those two groups to pursue what the agency calls NSF Engines development awards. These will receive up to $1 million to organize partnerships and planning to set up future applications for full-scale Engine awards. “This is a new space for NSF and the federal government as a whole,” the NSF asserts. “And the agency couldn’t be more excited about investing in the new frontier of American innovation, using a model that is designed to be inclusive, localized and audacious.”

Peter Gwynne, Contributing Writer
Boston, Massachusetts
[email protected]

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).