The speed with which Covid-19 vaccines were developed and their high-performance underlines how much society depends on the pace of scientific research and how effective science can be. This is especially the case for vaccines based on the new designer mRNA technology. We draw on this...

Innovation policy can be a crucial component of governments' responses to crises. Because speed is a paramount objective, crisis innovation may also require different policy tools than innovation policy in non-crisis times, raising distinct questions and tradeoffs. In this paper, we survey the...

This chapter provides an overview of grant funding as an innovation policy tool aimed at both practitioners and science policy scholars. We first discuss how grants relate to other contractual mechanisms such as patents, prizes, or procurement contracts, and argue that, among these, grants are...

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, policymakers, researchers, and journalists have made comparisons to World War II. In 1940, a group of top U.S. science administrators organized a major coordinated research effort to support the Allied war effort, including significant investments in...

From its 1958 origin in defense, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) model for research funding has, in the last two decades, spread to other parts of the US federal government with the goal of developing radically new technologies. In this paper, we propose that the key elements of the...