Innovation Policy

We hope to safely accelerate scientific and technological progress to make life better for billions of people.

Historically, economic growth and scientific innovation have created enormous social benefits, lifting billions of people out of poverty and improving health outcomes around the world. At the same time, innovation carries risk; some technologies have the potential to do far more harm than good.  

Our goal is to accelerate growth and innovation, without unduly increasing risks from emerging technology. Even small changes to the annual growth rate can compound to great effect over time, which gives us the opportunity to make high-leverage grants. 

We’re interested in pursuing a wide range of strategies. Our current interests include:

• Helping build a scientific ecosystem that experiments with new ways of doing things, learns from those experiments, and adopts evidence-based practices.
• Supporting early-stage development of general technologies with the potential to accelerate scientific progress across many disciplines.
• Investigating programs and policy reform to help more migrants, especially highly-skilled migrants, move to countries operating on the scientific and technological frontier.
• Providing financial support for individuals to write “living literature reviews” that rigorously synthesize research and communicate it to a non-specialist audience. (See our call for pre-proposals at right!)
• Funding programs and research to help identify and minimize potential catastrophic risks from new scientific and technological capabilities.

We launched the Innovation Policy program in November 2022. Our grantmaking so far doesn’t cover the full scope of our priorities; we expect to fund many other kinds of projects in the future.

While we do not accept unsolicited proposals, you can send thoughts or brief inquiries related to this program to innovation.policy@openphilanthropy.org. Our team will review all emails, but due to the volume of outreach we receive, we cannot guarantee a response.