Architecting a New Operating System for American Science
A personal perspective on modernizing the engine of innovation
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Today’s article is not related to quantum computing, but could be of interest for those who think about science & its culture, America, and the future of both. Recently the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) put out a “request for information” (RFI) on the topic of “Accelerating the American Scientific Enterprise”:
The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) requests input from all interested parties on Federal policy updates that aim to accelerate the American scientific enterprise, enable groundbreaking discoveries, and ensure that scientific progress and technological innovation benefit all Americans.
Reading through the RFI, I found myself reflecting on the structural foundations required to actually meet these goals, because I firmly believe that Science and Power co-exist in an uneasy equilibrium. To steady this situation and unlock a prosperous future serving the common good, we must look at the structural “Operating System” that connects them. Specifically, we need to move beyond legacy models of research to create more dynamic interfaces between discovery and application. This modernization isn’t just about policy; it is organizational, technical, and human—requiring new ways of structuring our institutions, new methods for maturing “unrefined” science, and new networks for the people who power American innovation.
Below is a perspective I developed in thinking about this RFI, informed by my “extracurricular” experiences working with the Unitary Foundation on the Board of Directors, serving on the Ecosystem Advisory Board for the DOE’s SQMS NQI Center, and being a non-resident fellow with the Foundation for American Innovation. Note that the perspective below is my own, and is not necessarily representative of my employer’s.
In sharing this perspective, I do not claim to have all the answers — but I do believe that these are some of the structural considerations we have to start exploring if we desire a prosperous future that serves the common good. While these reflections are informed by my work in the quantum ecosystem, the “bugs” in our “scientific operating system” are likely universal across nearly every deep-tech domain.
Introduction
Eighty years after Science, the Endless Frontier, the U.S. research ecosystem remains a global leader but faces a widening gap between modern scientific challenges and the institutional structures that support research. Many post-WWII assumptions—particularly that universities are the natural locus of organized scientific effort—no longer hold in an era where critical technologies and expertise also emerge from industry, independent nonprofits, and public–private partnerships.
Because the pace of translation from discovery to impact is governed as much by organizational design as by scientific insight, ensuring continued American leadership will require modernizing the institutional and funding structures through which science operates.
Modernizing the American scientific enterprise is a multifaceted challenge that requires more than incremental funding; it invites a structural update to the “operating system” that translates discovery into societal utility. While many interventions are worth exploring, this perspective focuses on three specific structural shifts which could better align the quest for discovery with the practical ends of national prosperity:
Exploring New Organizational Models: We can move beyond the legacy trinary of “University Lab”, “National Lab” and “Corporate R&D” by scaling Focused Research Organizations (FROs). These mission-driven, milestone-oriented institutions are designed to tackle high-impact problems at a scale academia cannot easily support, at a risk profile industry often avoids, and in an agile way.
Encouraging Dynamic Feedback Loops: There is an opportunity to let go of the linear “lab-to-market” model in favor of a more resilient interface. By fostering tighter loops between discovery and application, we can ensure that breakthroughs are more effectively pulled toward practical application, and that the requirements of practical applications can be better co-designed with emerging capabilities of “unrefined” scientific discovery.
Cultivating Durable Talent Networks: We can shift from rigid “talent pipelines” to more fluid, cross-sector networks. By empowering entrepreneurial scientists to move seamlessly between discovery, development, and deployment — and across institutional divides — we can ensure that American talent is engaged where it can be most effective.
By considering these organizational, technical, and human interfaces, we can begin to architect a scientific enterprise that more durably serves the common good.
Refactoring Collaboration: Re-wiring the Innovation Stack
Stronger public–private collaboration in use-inspired basic and early-stage applied research requires both cultural and structural reform; namely: 1) establishing new kinds of public-private partnerships to create research-driven organizations, 2) re-thinking how talent is developed, and 3) facilitating the development of better feedback loops between science and industry.
On establishing research-driven organizations: the traditional model of funding individual Principal Investigators (PIs) to lead large, multidisciplinary centers is increasingly mismatched to the organizational and managerial demands of complex, multi-stakeholder research. Academic culture focuses on the crucial tasks of producing research and advancing knowledge, not necessarily on organization-building. Because large centers too often depend on (comparatively) short-term grant cycles, have unclear (true) ownership, and operate within incentive structures usually misaligned with their long-term success, the ability of these centers to evolve into durable research-driven organizations is severely hampered.
A better approach lies in empowering entrepreneurial scientists—those able and willing to make institution-building their full-time pursuit—to lead new, mission-focused research entities. These leaders bridge the gap between disciplines and sectors while maintaining a research-driven ethos. As discussed in the comments below to question (vii), Focused Research Organizations (FROs), or similarly-chartered entities, are particularly well-suited to be “homes” to such entrepreneurial scientists. Public–private collaboration in this context will be strongest when the government enables such leaders to establish flexible, independent entities that can attract both public and private capital, rather than when it directly manages the institutions themselves.
On talent development: outside a few sectors such as AI, most graduate training remains confined to academic contexts with limited exposure to applied, industry-relevant challenges.
The computing community has shown what’s possible when talent mobility becomes normalized—students routinely intern in industry, faculty take temporary industry roles, and R&D laboratories collaborate directly with academia on shared problems. Extending this model across STEM fields would accelerate translation, knowledge exchange, and workforce development. This expansion would cultivate a ‘workforce of builders’ capable of both conceptualizing and realizing next-generation technologies the Nation needs.
A promising approach would be to pilot cohort-based industry rotation programs for graduate students. Cohorts of 10–20 trainees from multiple universities could spend three to six months working inside industry labs. Industry partners would fund stipends and project costs; federal agencies could provide light administrative coordination or seed matching. These cohorts would establish lasting professional networks and equip emerging scientists to operate fluently across sectors.
Organizations skilled at building cross-sector programs could help design, administer, or evaluate such pilots, demonstrating how such organizations can bridge academic, philanthropic, and industrial communities.
On facilitating feedback loops: A persistent friction in public-private collaboration is the misalignment between the “maturity” of scientific discovery and the “rigidity” of industrial requirements. Scientific output is often too “unrefined” for immediate industrial adoption, while industrial requirements are typically designed around existing technologies, with little room to accommodate—or even imagine—radical evolution.
The Nation lacks a common technical staging ground to mature ‘unrefined’ science into industry-usable tools. For the U.S. to remain competitive, we need to fund the integration environments where that research meets reality. This is exactly where mission-focused entities such as (similar to) Focused Research Organizations (FROs; see response to question (vii)) can thrive—by providing another organization in that “middle ground” between university, national lab, and industry to support the maturation of scientific discovery into industrially-usable and practical know-how.
The “Fourth Way”: Scaling Mission-Driven Models for the Modern Discovery Stack
As noted above in question (i), traditional, multi-stakeholder centers face challenges in governance, accountability, and long-horizon focus. The U.S. research enterprise would benefit from a broader portfolio of institutional forms designed around sustained, mission-driven collaboration.
Focused Research Organizations (FROs) exemplify one such model. Usually, FROs are temporary, nonprofit entities organized around clear technical goals pursued over five- to ten-year time frames by dedicated, full-time teams. They operate like research startups—combining rigor, focus, and agility while producing open, precompetitive assets for the scientific community.
Similarly, the Unitary Foundation, where I serve on the Board of Directors, demonstrates how agile nonprofits can make significant contributions to national science and technology goals. Through its microgrant program for “quantum explorers”, open-source research software efforts, and events such as unitaryCON and unitaryHACK, it has built a global community and lowered barriers to participation in the quantum technology ecosystem.
The Federal government could explore capital mechanisms tailored for FRO-like entities, perhaps administered via a federal FRO capital fund and distributed through experienced nonprofit partners (such as Convergent Research, Speculative Technologies, or entities similar in structure and mission to the Unitary Foundation) to catalyze similar missions across scientific domains, enabling structural innovation without enlarging federal bureaucracy.
The effectiveness of novel models like FROs would be enhanced when they are co-located with, or have priority access to, the specialized technical infrastructure required for their mission—including sovereign compute capabilities. By supporting the development of such technical infrastructure, the government can ensure these mission-driven teams have the resources required to tackle grand challenges in chemistry, energy, AI, etc.
The key principle should be pluralism in research models. We should empower more institutions to coexist along the continuum of basic to applied research. The government’s role should be to create a fertile environment for organizational innovation; for example, through flexible contracting, less prescriptive funding calls for key, large-scale research goods, and recognition of emerging nonprofit or hybrid models.
Human Capital Mobility: Designing for Fluid Cross-Sector Careers
Rather than viewing talent development as a linear ‘pipeline’ that terminates in a job, the Federal government should treat talent as a dynamic network: researchers fluidly move between discovery and application, knowledge is never siloed, and network effects are catalyzed for the Nation’s next-generation S&T leaders.
Historically, the U.S. scientific enterprise has excelled at cultivating academic talent but not always at preparing scientists for such dynamic, cross-sector careers. And while only a minority of STEM trainees remain in academia, most graduate programs are still structured around academic progression. Expanding structured opportunities for real-world collaboration would strengthen the nation’s innovation workforce.
The industry immersion cohorts described above in response to question (i) offer a scalable starting point. Complementary nonprofit initiatives – such as the Unitary Foundation’s microgrant program, which has successfully funded early-career quantum researchers to develop open toolchains and software – demonstrate how small-scale, distributed support systems can nurture scientific talent and participation.
Such programs illustrate the power of flexible, bottom-up approaches guided by mission nonprofits. Federal agencies could amplify impact by supporting coordination networks, lightweight funding, and shared evaluation frameworks linking universities, labs, and independent organizations.
The goal should be to cultivate enduring networks of scientifically trained professionals who can fluidly move between academia, startups, corporate R&D, and government – mirroring the culture of mobility that has proven so effective in computing and AI. These networks and the people within them are the next generation of our Nation’s technological leaders.
Closing the Loop: Architecting Unified Missions for Discovery and Application
Breakthrough innovation depends on active collaboration between theoretical scientists, applied engineers, and skilled technical staff. However, rigid disciplinary and institutional boundaries continue to fragment these communities.
Mission-focused initiatives like FROs and nonprofit programs such as the Unitary Foundation’s open collaborative events demonstrate how shared technical missions unite practitioners across diverse backgrounds. Structuring research environments around such integrated teams, rather than within institutional silos, cultivates mutual understanding, accelerates iteration, and aligns the research enterprise more closely with societal benefit.
True collaboration is fostered when researchers from disparate backgrounds are co-located (virtually or physically) to solve specific, mission-oriented challenges. By shifting the focus from ‘knowledge exchange’ (which is passive) to ‘integrated development’ (which is active), the American scientific enterprise could head toward a model where discovery and application are no longer separate phases, but a single, iterative loop.
Unlocking the Legacy Portfolio: Accelerating the Lab-to-Market Feedback Loop
Building on these collaborative reforms, let’s turn to how we can better leverage existing assets in national labs. National laboratories possess extensive portfolios of valuable intellectual property, yet it remains underutilized due to opaque processes and limited discoverability. A couple of practical reforms might help unlock this potential without significant new infrastructure:
Visibility: Create an open, searchable database of unlicensed or underused lab IP, organized by domain and aligned with national priorities.
Facilitation: Expand “entrepreneur-in-residence” and technology liaison programs that help scientists and nonprofit teams identify promising spinouts or cooperative R&D models. This also assists with the development of a robust talent network, as previously discussed.
These measures would accelerate lab-to-market transitions while enabling a greater range of organizations—including startups, consortia, and nonprofits (both “traditional” and FROs)—to develop federally funded innovations.
Conclusion
The success of the American scientific enterprise has always turned on its organizational creativity as much as on its scientific brilliance. To develop the next generation of game-changing technologies, the U.S. must modernize not only how science is funded but how it is organized.
This moment presents an opportunity to invest not just in research projects, but in the institutions and communities that make enduring scientific progress possible. Supporting new institutional models, fostering mobility between academia and industry, and empowering agile nonprofits will help ensure that America’s scientific capacity remains both world-leading and widely beneficial.
Advancing this vision requires a sustained dialogue between policymakers and those of us operating across these shifting institutional boundaries. My own work—which involves working across a wide range of stakeholders to find ways of translating quantum computing’s technical innovations into practical, social, and economic impact—is driven by the conviction that the “how” of science is just as critical as the “what.” I commend the OSTP for opening this vital conversation, and I look forward to continuing to support the practical work of building this new operating system.
If you were going to “debug” one part of the American scientific enterprise in 2026, where would you start? Let me know in the comments.
P.S. In addition to The Quantum Stack, you can find me online here.
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Note: All opinions expressed in this post are my own, are not representative or indicative of those of my employer, and in no way are intended to indicate prospective business approaches, strategies, and/or opportunities.
Copyright 2025 Travis L. Scholten. All rights reserved.
Hi Travis, great article and much needed perspective. I love the focus on entrepreneurial scientists and agree that there is limited social infrastructure supporting such individuals. There tends to be a binary approach to careers science in which one is either cloistered in a lab to enjoy intellectual freedom with limited ability to have an economic impact or one leaves science behind to become an economic decision maker. Your proposals bridge this gap.
Also, given the emphasis on FROs, are you familiar with Spectech?
https://spec.tech/model