Previous DOE support for 'A Broad Research Program in the Sciences of Complexity' permitted the Santa Fe Institute to initiate new collaborative research within its Integrative Core activities as well as to host visitors to participate in research on specific topics that serve as motivation and testing ground for the study of general principles of complex systems. The critical aspect of this support is its effectiveness in seeding new areas of research. Indeed, this Integrative Core has been the birthplace of dozens of projects that later became more specifically focused and then won direct grant support independent of the core grants. But at early stages most of this multidisciplinary research was unable to win grant support as individual projects-both because it did not match well with existing grant program guidelines, and because the amount of funding needed was often too modest to justify a formal proposal to an agency. In fact, one of the attributes of core support has been that it permitted SFI to encourage high-risk activities because the cost was quite low. What is significant is how many of those initial efforts have been productive in the SFI environment.
PDF
download
878987797
028-85220240
