Our government spends enormous amounts of money on basic research. I worry that, in addition to your fears about bureaucracy and sclerosis, the single pool of money creates an incentive problem. Researchers tune their research to what will get them more dollars, instead of the best research direction or the most value to society. Increasing the signal would include: spinning out more technologies (what will private markets fund), accepting research dollars from corporations (what research is fundable by the private markets; and as you note later, collaboration on the problems that matter), and collaborating more with researchers in private markets (this happens to some extent, but should be more widespread). Spectech plays an important role here in helping to build new signal pathways, especially given that you're a nonprofit that needs to raise dollars from non-government entities.
The contracts thing was an exceptionally bitter lesson for me this year. The huge gulf in expectations between an industry contracting department and university contracting department causes a lot of headaches for everyone. Makes it very hard for academic and industrial scientists to collaborate if they hadn’t had this particular bad experience beforehand.
I would really like to learn more about your conclusions wrt simultaneously raising nonprofit and for profit - have you read anything else that gets into this?
The framing of Spec Tech's objectives and survey of what has worked in the past and where the gaps are today has me thinking a lot more along the lines of "oh, yea that would be too much for a lab but probably needs more disciplines and expertise than would fit in one company", so the Double Downs make a lot of sense
I've empirically encountered a lot of the University monopoly on pre and non-commercial research, but I'd take it a step further and say the University monopolizes people's mind on such work. As if, anything new or developmental "must" have come from a University somewhere, and no other person(s) or entities could develop and commercialize new technology. This is highly pervasive in life science
Our government spends enormous amounts of money on basic research. I worry that, in addition to your fears about bureaucracy and sclerosis, the single pool of money creates an incentive problem. Researchers tune their research to what will get them more dollars, instead of the best research direction or the most value to society. Increasing the signal would include: spinning out more technologies (what will private markets fund), accepting research dollars from corporations (what research is fundable by the private markets; and as you note later, collaboration on the problems that matter), and collaborating more with researchers in private markets (this happens to some extent, but should be more widespread). Spectech plays an important role here in helping to build new signal pathways, especially given that you're a nonprofit that needs to raise dollars from non-government entities.
The contracts thing was an exceptionally bitter lesson for me this year. The huge gulf in expectations between an industry contracting department and university contracting department causes a lot of headaches for everyone. Makes it very hard for academic and industrial scientists to collaborate if they hadn’t had this particular bad experience beforehand.
I would really like to learn more about your conclusions wrt simultaneously raising nonprofit and for profit - have you read anything else that gets into this?
The framing of Spec Tech's objectives and survey of what has worked in the past and where the gaps are today has me thinking a lot more along the lines of "oh, yea that would be too much for a lab but probably needs more disciplines and expertise than would fit in one company", so the Double Downs make a lot of sense
I've empirically encountered a lot of the University monopoly on pre and non-commercial research, but I'd take it a step further and say the University monopolizes people's mind on such work. As if, anything new or developmental "must" have come from a University somewhere, and no other person(s) or entities could develop and commercialize new technology. This is highly pervasive in life science
Great Lessons and Hypotheses!