An unbending reward system prevents early-career researchers taking full advantage of the digital world.

Government support for startups is underrated, says Mariana Mazzucato.

Demand for steady output stymies discovery. To pursue the most important research, scientists must be allowed to shift their focus.

Long-term basic research, substantially funded by the U.S. government, underlies some of industry's most profitable innovations.

You’ll find communities thirsty for your findings – and a space to demonstrate measurable ‘impact’ to your heart’s content.

Recent studies highlight why policy changes are needed to make science more receptive to novelty, our columnist writes.

Evolve governance structures, practices and metrics to accelerate innovation in an era of digital connectivity, writes Martin Curley.

Austrian social scientist Helga Nowotny was president of the European Research Council between 2010 and 2013. Now a professor emerita of ETH Zurich and author of The Cunning of Uncertainty (Polity, 2015), Nowotny discusses the growing pressure to capitalize on academic research, and how countries can get it right in the absence of a universal recipe.

In science as in politics, most people agree that transparency is essential. Top journals now require authors to disclose their funding sources so that readers can judge the possibility of bias, and the British Medical Journal recently required authors to disclose their data as well so that experts can run independent analyses of the results. But as transparency becomes the standard, many academics are resisting the trend without pushback from their universities.

Entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley live by the motto of “Fail fast, fail often." Scientists would do well to likewise embrace failure.

In the fiercely competitive world of drug discovery and development, secrecy is no longer as important as it once was.

Billionaires are funding lots of grandiose plans. Welcome their ambition