Few Projects Are Islands: Issues with the Project Form in Publicly-funded R&D

Atlanta Conference on Science and Innovation Policy 2011This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder. ©2011 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.The use of project and project funding has become ubiquitous in science management and policy. Despite the success of some high-profile projects, we question the general movement to funding short-term projects. In this paper, we discuss the project form in publicly-funded science and draw on over a decade of field research in a number of publicly-funded laboratories.National Science Foundatio