Posted March 21, 2022 by Tiffany Lee
On March 16, the National Science Foundation launched a new directorate aimed at accelerating discovery, innovation and impact across the United States. The directorate, called Technology, Innovation and Partnerships, or TIP, is the agency’s first new directorate in more than 30 years.
TIP is aimed at extending NSF’s long trajectory of investing in research, innovation and education that transforms American lives, powers the economy and elevates the nation’s competitiveness on the global stage. With TIP, NSF officials hope to accelerate the development and deployment of new technologies and products.
“NSF’s TIP Directorate will accelerate discovery and innovation to rapidly bring new technologies to market and address the most pressing societal and economic challenges of our time,” said NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan in a March 16 news release. “By pursuing new approaches that engage the nation’s broad and diverse population in shaping research directions and outcomes, TIP will be a game-changer in terms of the pace of technological breakthroughs, future job growth and national competitiveness.”
Erwin Gianchandani is TIP’s inaugural assistant director.
Through TIP, NSF will launch a set of integrated initiatives intended to advance critical and emerging technologies; accelerate the translation of research from the lab to market and society; and cultivate new education pathways that facilitate building a diverse and skilled future technical workforce.
Over time, TIP will also establish regional “innovation engines” throughout the U.S. that advance use-inspired research, entrepreneurship and workforce development to boost regional industries.
NSF will shift much of its existing innovation and translation portfolio into the TIP Directorate, including the Lab-to-Market Platform, which includes NSF Innovation Corps, Partnerships for Innovation and America’s Seed Fund powered by NSF. It will also move the NSF Convergence Accelerator into TIP.
