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I think the moment a 'grant' has concrete deliverables (to a private firm?) it ceases being a grant and starts being some kind of consulting. I think people try

I think the moment a 'grant' has concrete deliverables (to a private firm?) it ceases being a grant and starts being some kind of consulting. I think people try to do this around ucla pretty often i.e. (I give a professor money -they do the research- I keep the IP)- it is pretty frowned upon in that context. In ML and CS I think this is probably more kosher-Michael Kearns seems to have a pretty thriving consultancy.

Fomite 8y ago
My university, in contrast, is pushing industry engagement like this pretty hard. I happen to disagree with that approach, but it is a thing. There is sort of a continuum between consulting and a research contract, admittedly, but I'll also note that I have government grants with deliverables. All it really means is that there's potentially interim products that need to be delivered, or that there's things that are less vague than papers and presentations that the agency/sponsor wants to see.
mattkrause 8y ago
DARPA structures a lot of its research funding like this. The 'award' is a contract, typically for data, models, etc. For example, the statement of work for my last project has about a dozen deliverables of the form "tabulated data comparing [outcome] against [experimental variable 1], [exp. variable 2], ...." or "a computational model relating...." As far as I can tell, they are not actually interested in the data itself; this is just a hack to use the procurement process to fund research. They were happy to let the researchers keep and share the data. In theory, the contract structure seems a lot more limited than an NIH, NSF, etc. grant, where you are minimally constrained by the proposal, but in practice, the program managers seem willing to amend the contract so that no one collects a bunch of obviously useless data.
- PAClearner 8y ago
  mmmm today i learned something new-thanks.

Fomite 8y ago

My university, in contrast, is pushing industry engagement like this pretty hard. I happen to disagree with that approach, but it is a thing. There is sort of a continuum between consulting and a research contract, admittedly, but I'll also note that I have government grants with deliverables. All it really means is that there's potentially interim products that need to be delivered, or that there's things that are less vague than papers and presentations that the agency/sponsor wants to see.

mattkrause 8y ago

DARPA structures a lot of its research funding like this. The 'award' is a contract, typically for data, models, etc. For example, the statement of work for my last project has about a dozen deliverables of the form "tabulated data comparing [outcome] against [experimental variable 1], [exp. variable 2], ...." or "a computational model relating...." As far as I can tell, they are not actually interested in the data itself; this is just a hack to use the procurement process to fund research. They were happy to let the researchers keep and share the data. In theory, the contract structure seems a lot more limited than an NIH, NSF, etc. grant, where you are minimally constrained by the proposal, but in practice, the program managers seem willing to amend the contract so that no one collects a bunch of obviously useless data.

PAClearner 8y ago
mmmm today i learned something new-thanks.