In the U.S. Federal government and other funding agencies transformative research is now being stressed. Incremental research that yields small advances has been assailed by the funding community as not being acceptable. This is
probably driven by reviewing the large amount of resources that have been expended to make small advances in science and engineering and the desire to drive the agenda faster and more effectively. The research community has learned how to write proposals that are fundable by suggesting small changes but which are not generally transformative in nature. The researchers please the reviewers by not being too innovative and not too exploratory. It has been a real danger to be transformative in a proposal because reviewers will not write favorable reviews saying that these ideas of too high risk. The Science Board Chair of the National Science Foundation, Steve Bering, who is the former President of Purdue University has been driving the National Science Foundation agenda with the transformative message. The National Institutes of Health are also giving the same message to the research community on the kind of transformative research they want and will fund.