Global Impacts
Quantitative Impacts
Actinide emphasizes tangible national and institutional impact in its work. We design a logic model (or theory of change) for each project: we build in data-collection instruments and define metrics for success. Our formative evaluations provide the data to guide iteration and adaptation, and our summative evaluations quantify the final impacts and provide a foundation for planning next steps. Monitoring, evaluation, and adaptation are our ongoing cycle for success and impact.
Peer Review Systems
Situation: The state of Washington created a $100 million Cancer Research Endowment (CARE) to be spent over 10 years to establish the state as a global center of technology-based medical innovation in cancer research and to prepare the next generation of researchers. To achieve this, the state had to attract leading cancer researchers to relocate and establish their labs in Washington state. However, the state had no experience in running such a program and appointed a Board with backgrounds in the research side of the equation.
Task: Design a national grant competition for the Board of CARE to implement, operate the peer-review process, and provide ongoing expert guidance to the Board in adapting and expanding the program.
Action: Design and operate comprehensive peer-review systems. Develop announcements, application materials, review criteria, and processes for impact reporting. Recruit, screen for conflicts of interest, convene expert reviewer panels, and lead consensus panel discussions. Prepare detailed consensus reviews with funding recommendations. Conduct in-depth annual analytical assessments of program design, outcomes, and impact, delivering strategic recommendations. Advise the CARE Board on ongoing program development, expansion, and problem solving.
Result: The CARE program is established as a national flagship for technology-based innovation in medical research, attracting more than $150 million in industry and other funding to add to the state's investments (a more than 150% ROI), resulting in more than 500 publications, and spawning the establishment of the Life Science Start-Up & Development initiave to incubate and accelerate economic impacts.
Innovation Ecosystem Development
Situation: The US Government sought to remove systemic barriers to technology-based innovation and economic growth across Central Asia by dramatically improving access to international research publications for scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs in Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan. The research communities in the region had long been isolated, were geographically dispersed, and had comparatively limited resources, infrastructure, and staff expertise to use off-the-shelf approaches.
Task: Create nationally integrated digital library systems opening access to at least 80% of the leading journals in all fields of science and engineering, and provide the capacity building necessary for the research community to expand their use of cutting-edge research and for the national governments to sustain access.
Action: Design and implement a Virtual Science Library program for Central Asia by creating a multilateral partnership with the UN Research for Life Program, national ministries, and academies of science in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan, and implement a multi-year training program for scientists, engineers, and science librarians to create capacity to use and maintain the system.
Result: Access was provided to ~17 million full-text research articles for 468 academic institutions across Central Asia. More than 3,000 researchers attended more than 120 workshops, and 2/3 of them were led by scientists and librarians from each country who were trained as trainers. The workshop participants downloaded >15,600 articles and increased their research publication rate by 55%. Governments committed to sustaining the programs.
Impact Assessment and Strategy
Situation: The New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology (NMT) sought to reorganize its intellectual property (IP) support offices, which were dispersed across four divisions, to increase the effectiveness of technology transfer and commercialization in alignment with its newly adopted Strategic Plan. Fragmented structures, limited resources, poor coordination, and inefficient processes resulted in low numbers of invention disclosures, a modest patent portfolio, and limited faculty and student engagement, despite robust applied research programs in energetics, petroleum recovery, cybersecurity, and related fields.
Task: Design, recruit experts for, and lead an external review panel assessment of NMT IP structures and commercialization processes. Analyze current functions, coordination gaps, and operational challenges across the four campus tech transfer support offices. Develop strategic recommendations for reorganization and process improvements to enhance innovation capacity and outcomes.
Action: Reviewed extensive background materials on NMT organizational structure, strategic plan, policies, and patent data. Conducted a four-day on-site review involving meetings with the university president, senior administrators, faculty, students, and key stakeholders. Identified overarching findings on entity roles, processes, and strategic considerations. Authored comprehensive external review report with detailed recommendations on structure, processes, funding, education, and engagement.
Result: Centralizing technology transfer operations in a new Office for Innovation, refocusing an existing university innovation foundation exclusively on fundraising, and establishing a dedicated Economic Development Division to coordinate campus-wide efforts. Streamlining of IP disclosure, evaluation, and licensing processes with clear timelines, template documents, and metrics tracking. These changes improved transparency, boosted faculty and student entrepreneurship, strengthened industry partnerships, and enhanced NMT’s overall research competitiveness and technology commercialization effectiveness.
AI Innovation
AI for the National Innovation System
Situation: Engineers, scientists, technology entrepreneurs, and STEM institutions that do not effectively use LLMs and other forms of AI will quickly fall behind. However, AI must be used in compliance with policies governing the originality of professional writing, and its use must protect intellectual property from theft or disclosure that could invalidate licensing or patent rights. In addition, AI systems are poorly suited to STEM without expert-designed agents for professional tasks. Finally, the field of AI is advancing rapidly, so solutions to these challenges must not lock people into a single platform; they must enable people to choose and use current and emerging platforms.
Task: Design a national program to create ethical, compliant, secure, and highly effective adoption of AI throughout the national innovation system.
Action: Implement a two-stage approach. First, develop detailed technical guidelines and provide training for institutions to establish enterprise access to AI systems that protect intellectual property. Second, develop a suite of AI agents that can be used with any cutting-edge AI platform (Grok, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc.) for which an institution may have secure enterprise access. Provide training at each institution to enable scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs to use and adapt the custom agents ethically, securely, and efficiently, in compliance with policies.
Results: The productivity of the National Innovation System will accelerate: the rate of discovery will increase; more inventions will successfully move through the TRL valley of death, and the economic impact from technology-based innovation will increase.
[N.B. The above example is forward looking. Unique among the impacts described here, this project is at the planning stage and is not yet implemented.]
Capacity Building
Situation: The US Government, in partnership with the Indonesian Ministry of Research and Technology (RISTEK) and the Directorate General of Higher Education (DIKTI), sought to improve the quality of proposals being submitted to national grant programs for technology-based innovation, to improve the quality and quantity of research publications to enhance Indonesia's global RDI visibility, and to improve capacity across a widely dispersed research community across several islands.
Task: Design a multi-year series of competency-based trainings on strategies for success in proposal writing and peer-reviewed publication to be led by a team of international experts in each geographic region of Indonesia.
Action: Designed two hands-on courses and recruited a team of well-experienced faculty. Held the courses in six cities across Indonesia over a two-year period. Developed a partnership with the Indonesian Chemical Society (HKI) and other scientific societies to ensure that course materials and ongoing follow-on trainings would be held to broaden the impacts. Established criteria for participants to be qualified and admitted into the courses to ensure participation from a range of institutions and fields of research. Prepared and administered a baseline assessment in advance of each course against which post-course impacts could be accurately measured.
Result: Directly trained nearly 300 researchers across six workshops, and 90% of participants indicated they would recommend the training to colleagues. Post-workshop impact assessments revealed strong knowledge transfer, with each participant sharing workshop content with approximately 30 others, resulting in an estimated 9,000 beneficiaries throughout the Indonesian research and innovation community. Outcomes demonstrated markedly enhanced research competitiveness: compared to the measured pre-training baseline, proposal submission rates by participants nearly tripled, proposal success rates more than doubled, total funding secured more than doubled, and participants began publishing their work in a greater diversity of high-quality international journals.
Global Leadership
The NSF International Funding Agency Symposium
Situation: The International Office of the US National Science Foundation received dozens of requests each year from funding agencies abroad to arrange consultative visits with NSF staff. Each organization came independently and required a separate, one-off effort to schedule and organize. While NSF valued visits from colleagues in global partner countries, the process was inefficient, and the visiting ministries did not benefit from interacting with one another.
Task: Improve the efficiency of visits by international partner organizations to the National Science Foundation. Enhance interactions among international partner organizations and between NSF staff across the NSF divisions and their counterparts in other countries. Remove barriers to organizing joint programs among NSF and partner organizations.
Action: Design a one-week symposium to convene ministerial STEM agencies from the Global Research Council. Convene representatives from the NSF divisions and GRC countries for a week of knowledge exchange and problem-solving to share best practices and develop bilateral and multilateral collaborations. Include presentations from NSF leadership, operations, and disciplinary divisions, and arrange site visits for presentations by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Mathematics, and the US National Insitutes of Health. Measure the impacts.
Results: Post-workshop evaluations showed high satisfaction (85%) and strong interest in having colleagues attend in the future (90%). In their written comments, participants highly valued the opportunity to network and share best practices not only with their NSF counterparts but also with colleagues from other national science funding agencies. NSF Program Officers all rated the symposium as “Excellent” or “Very Good,” and NSF authorized funding to repeat the Symposium. International participants reported that they built and strengthened their collaborations, and successfully identified the barriers in policy, process, and funding cycles to be overcome in creating joint programs.