How NSF’s TIP platform catalyzes innovation and workforce development across the U.S.

A Platform for Strategic Storytelling

The TIP Investments pilot offers dynamic storytelling, revealing how federal investments are seeding ecosystems, enabling new industries, and shaping the workforce. It helps translate abstract funding decisions into narratives that matter to the public, to Congress, and to the next generation of innovators.

As Dr. Erwin Gianchandani, NSF Assistant Director for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships noted during a recent webinar hosted by the National Academies’ GUIPRR (Government-University-Industry-Philanthropy Research Roundtable):

“It goes beyond papers, publications, and conference proceedings. It’s about patents, licenses, startups, job creation. It’s about thinking holistically about what impact really means.”

The platform is already informing how NSF approaches its Value Creation Framework, an emerging strategy for measuring how investments contribute to economic and social outcomes, especially in underserved regions.

Building Regional Innovation Capacity

One of TIP’s most ambitious goals is to catalyze broader participation in innovation, ensuring that regions across the U.S., not just established innovation clusters, can participate in and benefit from the innovation economy.

The TIP Investments pilot supports this goal directly. By visualizing award distribution across congressional districts and highlighting regional clusters, the platform offers a strategic tool for coalition-building, economic development, and policy alignment.

Local governments and economic development agencies can use the platform to identify funding opportunities, align regional strategies with federal investments, and demonstrate readiness to attract industry or philanthropic partners.

For researchers in emerging regions, the platform serves as an entry point into national networks, making it easier to find partners, form consortia, and build competitive proposals.

Enabling Workforce Development Visibility

Another cornerstone of TIP’s mission is workforce development, ensuring the U.S. has the talent needed to lead in critical technologies. But tracking how workforce investments translate into skills, jobs, and economic mobility has historically been difficult.

The TIP Investments pilot addresses this gap by incorporating workforce development projects directly into its visualization tools. Users can filter the nearly 5,000 grants by TIP's three pillars, including preparing the U.S. workforce providing unprecedented transparency into where and how these investments are distributed geographically.

The platform's evolution promises even deeper workforce insights in the future. Dr. Gianchandani highlighted ongoing efforts like the "Industry of Ideas" initiative, which tracks how individuals move through funded projects and measures concrete outcomes such as new job types created and salary changes before and after-intervention. This data-driven approach allows TIP to move beyond traditional academic metrics toward its Value Creation Framework, assessing impact through indicators like job creation, startups launched, and regional economic growth. By connecting these workforce metrics directly to the investment map, NSF aims to provide stakeholders, from policymakers to educational institutions, with actionable intelligence about how federal investments are building America's technical talent pipeline for critical emerging technologies.

Data Literacy and Public Engagement

By making investment data publicly available, TIP is laying the groundwork for more engaged stakeholders, more informed public discourse, and more strategic partnerships.

Educators can use the platform to show students what real-world innovation looks like. High schoolers can explore local projects in quantum or biotech and be inspired to pursue STEM careers. Journalists can identify trends. Investors can explore opportunities. Advocacy groups can track equitable distribution of funding.

This catalyzation of data is part of a broader cultural shift—one where science policy is open, responsive, and aligned with public values.

A Model for the Future

While the TIP-Elsevier collaboration began as a pilot, it offers a blueprint for broader transformation. Other NSF directorates—and even other federal agencies—may find similar value in building real-time, data-informed portals to tell the story of their investments and engage the ecosystem around them.

At its heart, TIP Pure is driven by purpose, not just technology.

It reflects a recognition that in today’s environment, funding research is only one part of the equation. What matters just as much is how we choose to learn from those investments, adapt to new insights, and share knowledge across institutional and geographic boundaries.

In a world where agility and foresight define competitiveness, TIP’s work stands as a powerful example of how public institutions can lead, not just in science, but in strategy.

Conclusion

By placing data at the heart of its operations, TIP is helping reshape how research is planned, funded, evaluated, and communicated. The TIP Investments pilot is helping drive a shift toward more coordinated systems and research aligned with societal needs.

This is what it means to lead in a data-rich era.