NSF SII-Center Proposers’ Lab services

The NSF Spectrum Innovation Initiative (SII) is a new NSF program designed to catalyze innovation research and cooperation between the nation’s many sectors engaged in spectrum research, including but not limited to federal agencies, commercial business, academic researchers, and formal and informal education institutions. In May 2020 NSF awarded 17 SII-Center planning grants to encourage interested groups to begin work designing plans for a national SII-Center that will meet the broad and visionary goals of NSF’s SII program. The SII-Center is a 5-year, $25M grant from NSF that is planned to be awarded in summer 2021. Because of the broad and visionary scope that NSF aims to support in an SII-Center, it is essential that NSF engage in pre-proposal activities with the prospective proposers to make clear the aims and goals that NSF seeks to enable through this new initiative.

NSF’s approach to helping proposers to plan the most competitive SII-Center proposals includes two key pre-proposal activities.

1 – in November, NSF will hold a NSF-run two-day webinar (no funding requested here – mentioned here only for context) of speakers and panel discussions to make clear to proposers what key national resources available are available for spectrum research and what key challenges various stakeholders feel need to be addressed in the coming years. Many of these challenges will be complex requiring sophisticated and likely novel solutions.

2 – in December, NSF will hold a 2-day Proposers’ Lab that will be facilitated through an expert external contractor (funding requested through this sole-source request) that will bring together likely proposers to brainstorm novel solutions and Center designs and possibly to catalyze individual proposers to join forces to submit a stronger combined proposal. The design of this Proposers’ Lab will borrow from the highly successful NSF IdeasLabs that have previously been used to develop new and novel solutions to challenging research problems in advance of other NSF funding opportunities (see, e.g., https://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=505229).

NSF has had success with the IdeasLab model and Knowinnovation has been the exclusive provider of development and support services for the facilitation of NSF’s past IdeasLabs. A key element of the Proposers’ Lab (as was also true with NSF’s past IdeasLabs) is the careful planning of Lab activities through collaboration meetings between NSF Program Officers and other scientists together with Knowinnovation’s activity managers. The need to catalyze novel ideas and new productive relationships between researchers who previously have not worked together and who may have previously been competitors is a great challenge and requires careful social engagement management. This is a key element of what Knowinnvation does in its Lab pre-activity with NSF. No other comparable contractor has been identified through market research that is able to provide both the pre-activity planning and development as well as the day-of facilitation of the activity.