Three learnings about Focused Research Organizations

A retrospective on four years of an experiment in a new way of organizing science.

It has been roughly 4 years now since Adam Marblestone and I originally conceived of Focused Research Organizations (FROs), building on years of discussions and collaborations with a variety of colleagues at MIT and elsewhere as we struggled to create more scalable science projects. In the time since then, Adam and I worked to flesh out the idea in a series of white papers, and Adam then founded Convergent Research with Anastasia Gamick to spin out FROs with the initial support of Schmidt Futures, a philanthropic initiative of Eric and Wendy Schmidt. Due primarily to the exceptional efforts…

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