People who run undergraduate labs would love to do something new (and the combi-chem angle can help to deliver that) but they don’t have the time resources to get things working.

This is exactly my opinion. I had loads of ideas for new labs - some with combi-chem aspects, but am faced with time constraints and derision from (some) colleagues who see such endeavors as a waste of time. However, at the moment I am confident that we have a critical mass of enthusiastic new staff who will together be able to get this thing moving, without sacrificing substantial amounts of 'research time' (so this has come just at the right time for us - in addition to some serious course revisions, so it needs to be done anyway). However, I know many other places won't be so lucky ...

One idea that stuck out at me at the time was using ROMP chemistry to do solid-supported reactions. My original concept was based on students synthesising their own ROMP catalyst in the inorganic labs, and using it to prepare reagents for eg a wittig reaction in the organic lab. Comparisons could be made with the traditional labbook method. I think there are a number of reactions that could be tackled this way.

Furthermore, with the recognition (no pun intended) that multivalent effects can be extremely important in novel drugs and understanding modes of cellular action, this might be another target (which might use the same ROMP approach, or another) - I can get an improved view on this tomorrow, when my carbohydrate colleague is back.

I'm sure there are a zillion other possibilities - already 2 ideas have spawned and been forgotten as I was writing the above.

For theoretical work, this would in many ways be simpler, and I envisage (if it isn't already there) and archive whereby people can upload the raw logfile (and have automated processing of the data). Molecules could be categorised based on the cartesian coordinates, and data for individual molecules could be stored for various different theoretical methods/levels, conditions (such as solvation), and ancillary information stored: energetics, HOMO/LUMO etc. Where such a database would have meta-value would be in 1. being an archive for many different conformations of the same molecule and/or TS rotomers and 2. an overarching view of theoretical methods and variations between them (especially for the DFT methods, since most benchmarking is run on a test set - so variations in whatever people use it for might reveal some interesting defects/highlights). And this could be linked into NIST experimental database. I'm sure it would save many thousands of hours of repeated computer time calculating things over again in different parts of the world for different projects and put an emphasis not on calculating power, but on data interpretation/method development and ideas.