This page is a list of frequently asked questions about the database, definitions, methodology, etc.  If you don’t see your question answered here please contact us and we’ll answer it.

Questions

Answers

  • Why not include market incentives? Market incentives are clearly an important part of the getting new technologies to scale in the market, which should generally attract R&D funding. But incentives are just one of a number of things that create a good environment for R&D, so we opted not to include it at this time.
  • Why not include government purchase of emerging technologies? Similar to market incentives, the government’s purchasing power can help to scale the market for emerging technologies, which should attract more R&D funding. But this is just one of many things that can spur R&D, so we did not include it.
  • Would you include innovation being done to make the government more efficient, or able to use greener energy? We have included it in the case where innovation is explicitly being done to make a broadly usable solution. For example, DARPA has many projects which will allow them to create or use energy in smarter ways throughout the military. If the intention is to address a specific situation, we have not included it. For example, we have not included any of the efforts to make the Capitol or other buildings more energy efficient, as the ones we have seen are all situation specific.
  • How did you pick these categories? We didn’t establish this initial set of categories until we’d looked at a large number of projects. We tried a few different categorization schemes, and found that the important things were that a) you could easily understand it, and b) most projects would fall clearly into a specific category. Using these criteria this set of categories stood out.
  • If a project showed up in multiple sources, how did you decide what to use? Many current projects showed up in multiple documents, and projects from FY09 and FY10 showed up in documents for multiple fiscal years. In general we used data that was a) most recent, and b) most specific, or at the smallest level of project granularity. The most recent document should have the firmest data, i.e. more is understood about the actual spending than at earlier times. The most specific data allowed us to allocate accurately to categories, and generally had the best project description.