In our work at AERDF we have built a community of practice for early stage research idea development informed by Advanced Research Program Agency (ARPA) methods. Our ARPA method includes the recruitment of independent research groups (referred to as Study Groups) which develop early stage ideas. In this practice, we are establishing a registration process to 1) help recognize/protect initial R&D concepts; 2) increasing transparency in the decision-making process of research project selection; 3) broadening participation in R&D activities into communities typically under-represented. In this talk we will share our initial results of how we built a process to support six study groups to register their early stage ideas and illustrate how advancing the adoption of early stage idea registration across organizations has the potential to map out complex research areas.