The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine will convene a workshop to explore disruptive innovation and the acceleration of scientific and technological progress. The primary goals of this convening are to understand the current state of the innovation studies scholarly literature; to investigate potential avenues, opportunities, and challenges for characterizing and assessing the rate of major advancements; and to explore key enabling factors (including funding) for advancing research and innovation broadly. Specifically, this workshop will discuss the following topics:

• Definitions, criteria associated with, and illustrative examples of major scientific and technological breakthroughs and disruptive innovation;
• Differences in the rate of major advancements and “breakthroughs per buck” for research across a variety of traditional and alternative grantmaking models sponsored by the federal government as well as other organizations such as philanthropic foundations;
• The strengths and limitations of available data and current methods for measuring disruptive innovation, including the validity of and issues associated with the citation analysis approach (the citation disruption (CD) index);
• Limits broadly associated with bibliometric data and indicators;
• Other potential data, measures, and leading indicators for capturing and measuring disruptive innovation; and
• Key elements enabling or limiting disruptive innovation, including the relationship between research productivity and research funding, the amount of research autonomy associated with award conditions, increasing costs of research (including compliance), and changes in peer review success rates.