Accelerating Academic Research with Impact Certificates

Humanity faces a number of long-term challenges, from climate change to inter-planetary exploration. Our current systems do a great job at incentivizing the startups that tackle the near-term engineering challenges, especially when there is an immediate path to revenue.

However, we need significantly better systems to incentivize answering the fundamental unanswered questions that will unlock the path to our long-term prosperity. Are impact markets the answer? Let's figure it out together!

The goal of the talk is to encourage discussion and feedback on some early stage proposals to bring more funding, alignment, and impact to academic research, leveraging impact certificates and markets as a coordination mechanism. We discuss how these mechanisms work, and how they might be able to improve the state of research funding.