At the annual Global Research Council meeting, heads of funding agencies from across the world discussed how to promote scientific breakthroughs, ScienceInsider reports.
The challenge is that "real innovations are those that come about unexpectedly, and this means we cannot actually plan for and organize them," Peter Strohschneider, the president of the German Research Foundation, says. "In our strategies, we have to institutionalize something we cannot actually institutionalize."
Still, to try to encourage researchers to embark on research that could lead to such innovations, the council concludes that researchers need to have the freedom and ability to take risks, even if it could lead to failure.
Next year's Global Research Council meeting is to focus on women in the scientific workforce and how to support interdisciplinary research, ScienceInsider adds.