There are 40,000 families globally with $100 million or more in wealth. These families could play a catalytic role in a 21st-century renaissance, in the same way that wealthy Italian families supported the Italian Renaissance. More recently, the Rockefeller Foundation supported the Green Revolution and the emergence of molecular biology as a new scientific discipline, and many foundations contributed to the child survival revolution that dramatically reduced child mortality in developing countries, demonstrating the impact thesis-driven funds can make.

Many of today’s wealthy individuals and families have expressed interest in playing this catalytic role, including by committing to give away at least half of their wealth during their lifetimes. However, according to a report by Bridgespan, the average level of philanthropy from wealthy families in the United States is roughly 1.2 percent of their wealth.

What accounts for this gap between the stated intentions and actions of philanthropists? We think there are two primary factors.

First, we know from historical examples that ambitious philanthropy often requires access to talented individuals. Consider the role of the Rockefeller Foundation in creating the field of molecular biology. Warren Weaver, the director of the natural sciences division at Rockefeller, hypothesized that advances in physics could transform our understanding of life at a molecular scale. Based on that hunch, he assembled and supported a group of physicists, chemists, and biologists, leading to breakthroughs such as the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA. Between 1954 and 1965, 18 Nobel Prizes were awarded for work on molecular biology, and 15 of these prize winners had been funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. Notably, the foundation had funded these scientists on average 19 years before they won their prizes. On their own, philanthropists may have a hard time emulating Warren Weaver.

Second, many philanthropists are either hesitant or unable to find and recruit Warren Weaver-like individuals to support their philanthropic giving through thesis-driven funds. The reasons for this include (a) the philanthropists are still professionally active and don’t have much time to devote to philanthropy, (b) they do not want the overhead of hiring and supervising a team, (c) they may not be interested in the publicity which building an institutional giving vehicle can attract, or (d) they are unsure where to find and how to recruit the Warren Weaver equivalents in their fields of interest.

Read the full article about thesis-driven funds by Tom Kalil and Anna McKelvey at Stanford Social Innovation Review.