User:Vipul/Breakout Labs

Breakout Labs is a grant-making body operating as part of the Thiel Foundation (a philanthropic organization created by Peter Thiel). Breakout Labs gives grants for early-stage scientific research that is too speculative or long-term to interest the for-profit sector (such as angel investors and venture capitalists) but may be unsuitable for traditional sources of funding for scientific research due to its radical or offbeat nature. Grants are made through a competitive application and selection process.

Recipients
Breakout Labs announced its first batch of grantees on April 17, 2012. The full list of grantees is on the Breakout Labs website. The first batch of grantees is: Arigos Biomedical, Positron Dynamics, Immusoft, Longevity Biotech, 3Scan Corp, and Inspirotec.

Shifting the focus to innovation
Peter Thiel has proposed a dichotomy between:


 * Intensive growth, which involves the creation of radical new technology. He likens this to going from zero to one.
 * Extensive growth, which involves spreading existing technology to more people and making it faster, cheaper, and better. Globalization is an example of extensive growth. Thiel likens extensive growth to going from 1 to N.

Thiel believes that too many people in business and philanthropy are focused on extensive growth and there is too little focus on intensive growth. Thiel thus concentrates most of his philanthropic efforts on efforts that he considers likely to lead to intensive growth, i.e., radical innovation. Breakout Labs is part of these efforts.

Media coverage
The announcement of Breakout Labs (October 2011), as well as the announcements of its first batch of grantees (April 2012), received considerable media attention. Alexia Tsotsis covered the first batch of grantees for TechCrunch. Breakout Labs was also covered in Nature Magazine and Scientific American.