All it takes is an idea.
This is the line so often used to encourage innovators to come up with problem-solving, game-changing solutions to the world’s problems. But it is rarely – if ever – as simple as that.
Ideas need to be explored and tested before they can become actual solutions. Scientific research, in particular, plays an important role in manufacturing knowledge that drives innovation and progress that spills over to society and the economy.
But most of the time, ideas don’t leave the idea stage because the people who have them are not able to explore and test them. This is especially true for young researchers who do not have the opportunity to work on their own ideas due to lack of resources and support.
Research grants from various institutions help address this, though generally their criteria are stringent and are geared towards specific solutions as a result.
In 2009, Leave a Nest launched the LNest Grant with the aim of supporting passionate early career researchers to pursue their own ideas and projects. Since then, the LNest grant has offered close to 200 independent grants to over 360 researchers.
Nurturing explorations
The LNest Grant began as a brainstorm of Leave a Nest members when they first earned profit as a company: how can they use the money for something good?
Staying true to their vision of “Advancing Science and Technology for Global Happiness,” Leave a Nest launched the LNest Grant to help bring potentially world-changing ideas from the minds of researchers out into where it could be accessed by key industry players that can help nurture those ideas into actionable solutions.
Fuelled by their own profit, the LNest Grant aimed to support passionate young researchers to pursue ideas or projects that fascinate them. It was designed to give them access to financial resources that would offer the opportunity to explore their ideas and accelerate the research process.
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Over the years, Leave a Nest has expanded the grant by working with various companies like Panasonic, Yoshinoya, Sony, and Fujifilm to offer grants to young researchers.
Recently, they worked with Delightex, a research and venture creation company that seeks to create new services around creating delightful moments with naturally occurring substances.
Through this partnership, Leave a Nest was able to offer a grant to anthropology researchers to explore the potential of building new solutions around traditional medicines, herbs, and rituals.
Seeding ideas
What makes LNest Grant stand out is that unlike other grants, researchers are free to work on a broad variety of topics.
The first grant awardee in the United Kingdom, for example, is Ruiz Gonzalez Antonio Rafael, a PhD student researching the development of deep-learning diagnostics for depression based on non-invasive wearable potassium biosensors. The LNest Grant called for applications for “any research in Science,” and received applications with topics ranging from astrophysics, material science, and more.
Apart from that, Leave a Nest and their partners do not make any Intellectual Property (IP) claims on the research and the results, nor do they require researchers to be able to create new business as a result.
This really highlights the real purpose of the LNest Grant to help researchers kickstart their projects and build on their ideas. With the pressure of creating business or profit taken out of the equation, researchers can focus on pursuing avenues in their research that may not immediately lead to business but may create more opportunities for discovering world-changing solutions.
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Even with grants provided in partnership with large corporations, creation of new business is not the main goal; rather, it is to provide a platform for companies to discover ideas they previously did not have access to, that they could work on with the researchers to potentially develop into a business at a later time.
Essentially, Leave a Nest and the companies they partner with for the grant are investing in and enabling researchers to fully focus on developing and accelerating research on their ideas: manufacturing knowledge and exploring potential world-changing ideas, without the pressure of immediate business application
Leave a Nest Global Challenge Grant
As Leave a Nest celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, they aim to stay true to their roots and keep contributing to the advancement of knowledge through academic research.
They believe that in a post-COVID-19 era, academic research would play a more important role in solving the issues the world is facing, as well as in designing the future of humanity.
Aligned with this, Leave a Nest is announcing the launch of the LNest Global Challenge Grant.
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The LNest Global Challenge Grant is calling for grant proposals from young researchers who have ideas on or are working on research that can potentially contribute to solving issues that the world is facing today.
Any research from young scholars related, but not limited to, healthcare, environment, agriculture and food, nature, society, and education are welcome.
They will be selecting 5 young researchers from Singapore, who will each receive a grant of SGD 5,000 to aid in accelerating their research process.
Click here to apply.
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This article is produced by the e27 team, sponsored by Leave a Nest
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