Finding Our Future: A Research Agenda for the Research Enterprise
Abstract
For more than 50 years, the U.S. government has supported and encouraged scientific discovery through grants to researchers in laboratories and educational institutions around the nation. From its modest beginning in the late 1940s, the publicly supported research enterprise has grown, matured, and evolved into a $112-billion endeavor involving thousands of organizations and investigators representing every scientific discipline and field of knowledge. The research enterprise is not only large, complex, and important in its own right, it is also embedded in a political, economic, and social environment that exerts strong influences on research topics and priorities, methods and principles, and opportunities for involvement. This report discusses these challenges, offers a vision of the ideal research enterprise, and lays out a supporting research and action agenda to help achieve it.