The United States is home to world-class research institutions, a vibrant startup accelerator ecosystem, a government willing to invest in winning tech arms races and a culture of entrepreneurship. Globally, we’re unmatched in coming up with good ideas.

What we don’t do as well is maximizing the utility of our investment – prioritizing the research most critical to our national security and then ensuring a return of local economic growth, with ventures that create jobs and long-term value. Billions of dollars funding research are fueling revolutionary scientific discovery, but they aren’t enhancing our national security or generating local economic value at the scale they could deliver.

It’s no secret that it’s tough to attract capital to early tech, but most solutions to this problem tend to focus on the capital or the technology. The right talent can break the logjam.

Yesterday, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) announced a multiyear pilot program with NobleReach’s Science to Venture platform to accelerate the translation of emerging technologies for national security applications. This program will identify promising research, guide it out of the lab and, most importantly, build local capabilities and pipelines of the many different people needed on the path from good idea to viable venture.

It’s a solution aimed at a persistent impediment to the American innovation ecosystem. Namely, you can have all the right ingredients – research, resources and significant outside investment – and still fail to sustain and scale a local tech hub, if you don’t have enough of the right people or a good way to train or recruit more of them.

Seasoned talent brings the credibility, trust, and experience required to develop promising tech, attract national resources, orchestrate an ecosystem, nurture the next generation and transform isolated programs into connected ecosystems. This is NobleReach’s mission: to find and develop mission-driven leaders and connect them with opportunities to solve our nation’s most pressing challenges.

Together with two NSF Innovation I-Corps™ (NSF I-Corps) Hubs, we’ll align stakeholders across siloes, offer train-the-trainer curricula and toolkits that institutionalize proven commercialization methods, crowd in capital, build networks linking entrepreneurs, mentors and subject-matter experts to research teams and create replicable frameworks and AI-enabled assets that can be extended across the lab-to-market ecosystem. We’ll strengthen local capacity for innovation, bridge the fragmentation and the valleys of death consuming too many promising ventures and lay the groundwork for a pipeline of entrepreneurial talent.

Our goal is to leave a repeatable model that will thrive well beyond federal investment, and our approach is predicated on our core belief that the best way to create long-term change is to empower a community of changemakers.

Join our Science to Venture platform and help unlock American innovation through talent today.