RFP: Domain-Specific Landscapes of Research-Commercialization Bottlenecks

Renaissance Philanthropy’s Fund Ecosystem Program is soliciting grants proposals for up to $20,000 to support short landscape analyses of why valuable scientific progress and innovations fail to reach the world in specific domains, and what someone could do about it.

Background

The U.S. government invests over $200 billion a year in research, and through the Bayh-Dole Act has a globally envied route for university inventions to be licensed out of the lab, together producing more than 19,000 startups and more than 200 drugs over the past three decades. Yet the return on each research dollar has been falling for most of that period. A similar trend plays out in other countries like the UK and India.

Over two years and through hundreds of interviews with scientist-entrepreneurs, federal agencies, venture capitalists, and tech-transfer executives, Orin Herskowitz and colleagues catalogued over 60 avoidable "leaks" in the lab-to-market pipeline (the full list is here). They fall into five broad categories:

  • Training and incentives. Scientists are selected and rewarded for publishing and winning grants, not for building companies, and tenure and promotion rarely credit commercial work. A faculty member who wants to spin out a company often has never seen it done up close, lacks the tacit knowledge of how, and may worry that the attempt reads as a distraction or a conflict of interest. Promising science stays on the bench because the people closest to it are neither trained nor rewarded to move it.
  • Slow, bureaucratic processes. The handoff from lab to company runs through university tech-transfer and conflict-of-interest committees that often review each case from scratch, slowly, and sometimes adversarially. Licensing terms are negotiated deal by deal, and conflict-of-interest rules differ across the federal agencies that fund the underlying research (NIH, NSF, DOE, ARPA-E, ARPA-H), with little coordination between them. Months of friction at exactly the moment a venture is most fragile is often enough to stall it or push a founder to give up.
  • Awareness of best practices. A small set of experienced institutions — MIT, Stanford, Columbia, Penn — have learned what efficient patenting, licensing, and gap funding look like, but that knowledge is largely tacit and stays local. Tech-transfer offices elsewhere underperform.
  • Access to talent. A scientific founder usually cannot run the company alone; they need experienced operators, business-development people, and mentors who have made the lab-to-market journey before. Outside the major hubs that pool of people is thin, and academic founders rarely have the networks to find or recruit them, so good science is paired with inexperienced teams or no team at all.
  • Access to funding. Capital is scarce in the stretch between a working lab result and a company a venture investor will back — the so-called "valley of death." The risk at that stage is high and the timelines are long, which suits neither most VCs nor most banks, and the federal programs built for it (such as SBIR/STTR) are hard to discover and harder to navigate. Capital-intensive deeptech, where the first commercial-scale facility is itself a major expense, is hit hardest.

What we want to understand is which of these blockers, or others not on this list, is the binding constraints in a particular domain, and why.

The goal of each landscape is to work out what a dedicated "general manager" for commercialization of high social return innovations in that domain could do to unblock its constraints: the concrete steps a person who genuinely owned the problem would pursue.

This RFP is part of a larger effort at Renaissance Philanthropy to identify why valuable scientific progress and innovation fails to reach the world in specific domains. Our team started with conversations with tech transfer experts at university tech transfer offices and beyond, scientists, investors, accelerators, entrepreneurs, and other science and technology ecosystem participants. That initial round of discussions surfaced major insights and intriguing ideas. In this next phase, we are seeking to understand specific verticals or domains more deeply, to validate our initial findings as well as to check for themes across verticals.

Questions to answer

  • What is the single most binding constraint on this domain reaching the world, and what would change if it were relaxed?
  • What is the domain's real path from lab to use, and why does the standard spinout-or-license model fit it poorly?
  • What would a commercialization general manager actually do about it — which instruments, partnerships, shared infrastructure, or capital structures — and what is the highest-leverage first move?
  • Who is best placed to act, and where is the open white space?
  • What portions of this domain of the highest social returns? (e.g. improved lifespan, increased incomes, etc.) How do social returns overlap with financial returns?

Domains

We are open to any domain with a large lab-to-use gap and a plausible way to unblock it, and we would be glad to see applicants propose their own. A domain that could also attract venture capital is welcome — what we care about is what unblocks it. Some areas we are interested in:

  • Materials and chemistry — separations, sorbents, catalysts, solvents, advanced materials, manufacturing and scale-up.
  • Health and life sciences beyond small-molecule pharma — diagnostics, devices, biologics, antimicrobials, and platform technologies and research tools.
  • Agriculture, food, and the bioeconomy — crop and animal genetics, agricultural biologicals, post-harvest and supply-chain technology, industrial biotechnology.
  • Scientific tooling, data, and AI-for-science — research instruments, datasets, and scientific models
  • Social science — applied microeconomics, program evaluation, and policy research, where the relevant translation is adoption into policy and practice rather than a product sold to a market.

We are not looking at climate or clean energy in this RFP, given the existing efforts on that particular commercialization gap.

Deliverable and method

We are looking for a written memo that answers the questions above with enough specificity to act on. We do not have strong views on length, format, or method; use whatever combination of interviews, reading, and data gets you to a well-grounded answer, and be candid about what is uncertain or contested. A short check-in around the halfway point is welcome, and the rest of the process is yours. We expect the memo to be shareable, and you are free to publish your own version.

Who should apply

The ideal applicant has hands-on experience with science commercialization in a specific domain. They might be a former scientist-turned-entrepreneur, an investor in university spinouts, or someone who has worked at a “meta” organization like Activate supporting scientific founders.

How to apply

Please apply via this Airtable form, which will ask you the domain you propose to roadmap, your key open questions, your proposed budget (up to $20,000), and the timeframe you’d like to do this on.

In choosing among proposals we will look hardest at domain expertise and access, how concrete and plausible your thinking is about what would actually unblock the domain, and at your readiness to follow the evidence somewhere the consensus has not yet gone.

Priority will be given to applicants who can submit a finished work product by September 30, 2026.