Love seeing the experimentation in research models, as well as nanotech projects specifically! I was very excited to see the announcement, and will be looking forward to seeing what you come up with. I'm late to the party, but a couple of questions if you get to them:

I'm guessing the work most of your projects will be doing will (if successful) generate some patent output. Is that correct, and if so do you have a concrete plan for those?

You mentioned experimenting with new ways of managing research. Do you have ideas for management experiments you're excited to try, or is that primarily in attempting a private ARPA-style project (which is certainly a huge project on its own!)?

P.S. -- Just realized this morning that you're the same Ben Reinhardt I went to high school with for two trimesters (before I got mono and fell off the face of the earth). Small world -- wish I'd gotten to know you better then! Great to see you working on such cool stuff!

What are the primary characteristics you think an effective "culture of progress" would have?

Do you see any concrete, meaningful steps being taken to get to such a culture? Any opportunities in that direction that you see that you wish were being worked toward right now but aren't?

What's the lowest-hanging fruit you see in Progress Studies? What are the research topics or programs that are sitting there, waiting on the right people? If it's important to the answer, who are the right people?

Sounds like a great addition! Congrats to both Roots of Progress and Heike =)