The 2020 Knowledge Challenge, Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation

Context & Funding Opportunity

The 2020 Knowledge Challenge supports activities aimed at improving our understanding about entrepreneurship in the United States. The goal of the Knowledge Challenge is to produce tangible insights about the levers, tools, and methods that can inform relevant stakeholders, including entrepreneurs, entrepreneurship programs, policy design, ecosystem builders, and researchers.

The Knowledge Challenge grew out of the need to strengthen the feedback loop between research and practice by curating a research portfolio driven by pressing problems faced by entrepreneurs, entrepreneurship support organizations, and policymakers. The structure and focus groups of the Knowledge Challenge were identified and designed based on surveys and feedback from these stakeholders.

Successful proposals should have a sound scientific approach and should clearly describe how they will advance current knowledge and how these insights will benefit entrepreneurs and those that aim to support them. Successful proposals will clearly articulate the users and beneficiaries of the research, as well as how the research will yield tangible and actionable insights. Research projects should aim to balance specific project components with the potential for scalability and generalizability of the expected findings.

The Knowledge Challenge application process has two rounds. In the first round, proposers will submit a white paper describing key details about the project need, plan, and expected gains. In the second round, selected white papers will be invited to full proposal submission.

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