Accelerating Scientific Discovery by Formulating Grand Scientific Challenges

TL;DR

This paper discusses the strategy of using Grand Challenges to stimulate scientific progress by focusing collective efforts on fundamental, difficult questions, inspired by historical successes like Hilbert's problems.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of Grand Challenges as a means to accelerate scientific discovery, inspired by successful historical examples and applied within the FuturICT project.

Findings

Grand Challenges can effectively focus scientific efforts.

Formulating fundamental questions stimulates interdisciplinary research.

Historical examples like Hilbert's problems demonstrate success.

Abstract

One important question for science and society is how to best promote scientific progress. Inspired by the great success of Hilbert's famous set of problems, the FuturICT project tries to stimulate and focus the efforts of many scientists by formulating Grand Challenges, i.e. a set of fundamental, relevant and hardly solvable scientific questions.