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Not competition as much as complementary or even necessity. Institutional funding funds enables people to have a career in research. A career that allows them t

Not competition as much as complementary or even necessity. Institutional funding funds enables people to have a career in research. A career that allows them to build up the necessary expertise in order to have a stab at the research prize. As with development programs, such prizes tap into an existing reservoir of know-how.

bluGill 4y ago
I could do research. I'm smart enough and all that. (we can argue about who is smartest and all that, probably institutions are right to not come knocking at my door trying to hire me - but in the end if somehow I ended up at a university I could do at least okay at research) My day job is not doing basic research though, so it would take me some time to come up to speed on the important hard problems that researchers are working on. Then more time to contribute. There is nothing unique about me above. There are a lot of smart people around who are not doing research. Basic research is important to progress humanity, but for every person in basic research thousands are needed in the more applied areas to take known research results and apply them to life thus making our life better.
cycomanic 4y ago
Maybe I misunderstand you but institutional funding does almost never enable research. Almost all research funding comes from competitive grants. So "researchers" in research institutions spend most of their time looking for funding. I was talking with a colleague the other day and he said the head of a research group is essentially running a startup, except you're constantly in the search for funding phase without the prospect of it ever becoming self-sustaining. The process is completely broken.
- yvdriess 4y ago
  > The process is completely broken. I agree. Personally, it's a big reason why I went to industry to do research. > Maybe I misunderstand you but institutional funding does almost never enable research. Mostly disagree. Two reasons: other institutional funding sources (e.g. teaching positions, personal or company grants, fundamental research grants, ...) and post-docs or profs hustling to shelter phd students from most of that overhead. Despite the incredible inefficiencies inherent in competitive research grants, research labs can scrap together funding with some form of continuity. What you do get often is an 'accordion effect', where a lab can swell in numbers on the coattails of few successful phd students and series of impactful papers, but at some point there's a crunch when it cannot lock in the same number of new research projects.
- ModernMech 4y ago
  > I was talking with a colleague the other day and he said the head of a research group is essentially running a startup, except you're constantly in the search for funding phase without the prospect of it ever becoming self-sustaining. Your colleague is right that being a PI in a research lab is a lot like being a startup founder. But we shouldn't take that to mean that research labs should be startups, with goals like establishing a profitable revenue stream that will assure a self-sustaining operation. That's just not the purpose of research, and trying to make it as such would change the kind of research being done. The other thing is that like a startup, research labs get a significant chunk of "startup capital" in order to get their research agenda off the ground. Depending on the agenda, this can range from 10s of thousands to a million dollars or more. Third, there is other institutional funding that goes beyond that. It's true that most funded research is through grants, but at the same time it's hard to get grants without some prior research results. That's where institutional funding comes in -- to give you a little boost to bootstrap some results that you can then take to a funding agency. > So "researchers" in research institutions spend most of their time looking for funding. I think I know why you put "researchers" in scare quotes, and that is because of a common perception that "research" is limited to the technical work of running an experiment and writing papers (please correct me if I'm wrong). But I disagree with this view, and instead I consider research as also including getting the money. Why? It has to, because getting the money involves setting clear research objectives, communicating those objectives to others in an understandable way, forging alliances with other researchers, navigating regulatory obstacles, hiring competent research personnel, designing research experiments, and most importantly managing the project over a decade or more without the whole thing imploding. That is research, because if you don't do those things you're just doing a "project". Getting something into the world and getting buy-in from external agencies is important precisely because there is no revenue stream and no customers who provide feedback to your venture. Sitting down and doing the coding, running experiments, or even writing the paper is important to the scientific research process, but it's still just a part of it. Certainly it's not enough to be considered "proper" research, distinct from securing funding. > The process is completely broken. You're not going to find a lot of disagreement that the process is broken. But one thing I've often found is that those who are part of the process and those who are outside of it think it's broken in different ways. Sometimes people outside of the process suggest to fix it in ways that will make things worse or are not actually a problem. Sometimes the solution proposed would in fact likely cause more problems that those outside the process can't anticipate, or were fixes to problems that have already been patched. It's a lot like systems engineering -- when you go to a new codebase and start changing legacy code that looks wrong because you know a better way of doing it. Well... maybe it's not wrong but that way for a reason, and you just don't know it yet.

bluGill 4y ago

I could do research. I'm smart enough and all that. (we can argue about who is smartest and all that, probably institutions are right to not come knocking at my door trying to hire me - but in the end if somehow I ended up at a university I could do at least okay at research) My day job is not doing basic research though, so it would take me some time to come up to speed on the important hard problems that researchers are working on. Then more time to contribute. There is nothing unique about me above. There are a lot of smart people around who are not doing research. Basic research is important to progress humanity, but for every person in basic research thousands are needed in the more applied areas to take known research results and apply them to life thus making our life better.

cycomanic 4y ago

Maybe I misunderstand you but institutional funding does almost never enable research. Almost all research funding comes from competitive grants. So "researchers" in research institutions spend most of their time looking for funding. I was talking with a colleague the other day and he said the head of a research group is essentially running a startup, except you're constantly in the search for funding phase without the prospect of it ever becoming self-sustaining. The process is completely broken.

yvdriess 4y ago
> The process is completely broken. I agree. Personally, it's a big reason why I went to industry to do research. > Maybe I misunderstand you but institutional funding does almost never enable research. Mostly disagree. Two reasons: other institutional funding sources (e.g. teaching positions, personal or company grants, fundamental research grants, ...) and post-docs or profs hustling to shelter phd students from most of that overhead. Despite the incredible inefficiencies inherent in competitive research grants, research labs can scrap together funding with some form of continuity. What you do get often is an 'accordion effect', where a lab can swell in numbers on the coattails of few successful phd students and series of impactful papers, but at some point there's a crunch when it cannot lock in the same number of new research projects.
ModernMech 4y ago
> I was talking with a colleague the other day and he said the head of a research group is essentially running a startup, except you're constantly in the search for funding phase without the prospect of it ever becoming self-sustaining. Your colleague is right that being a PI in a research lab is a lot like being a startup founder. But we shouldn't take that to mean that research labs should be startups, with goals like establishing a profitable revenue stream that will assure a self-sustaining operation. That's just not the purpose of research, and trying to make it as such would change the kind of research being done. The other thing is that like a startup, research labs get a significant chunk of "startup capital" in order to get their research agenda off the ground. Depending on the agenda, this can range from 10s of thousands to a million dollars or more. Third, there is other institutional funding that goes beyond that. It's true that most funded research is through grants, but at the same time it's hard to get grants without some prior research results. That's where institutional funding comes in -- to give you a little boost to bootstrap some results that you can then take to a funding agency. > So "researchers" in research institutions spend most of their time looking for funding. I think I know why you put "researchers" in scare quotes, and that is because of a common perception that "research" is limited to the technical work of running an experiment and writing papers (please correct me if I'm wrong). But I disagree with this view, and instead I consider research as also including getting the money. Why? It has to, because getting the money involves setting clear research objectives, communicating those objectives to others in an understandable way, forging alliances with other researchers, navigating regulatory obstacles, hiring competent research personnel, designing research experiments, and most importantly managing the project over a decade or more without the whole thing imploding. That is research, because if you don't do those things you're just doing a "project". Getting something into the world and getting buy-in from external agencies is important precisely because there is no revenue stream and no customers who provide feedback to your venture. Sitting down and doing the coding, running experiments, or even writing the paper is important to the scientific research process, but it's still just a part of it. Certainly it's not enough to be considered "proper" research, distinct from securing funding. > The process is completely broken. You're not going to find a lot of disagreement that the process is broken. But one thing I've often found is that those who are part of the process and those who are outside of it think it's broken in different ways. Sometimes people outside of the process suggest to fix it in ways that will make things worse or are not actually a problem. Sometimes the solution proposed would in fact likely cause more problems that those outside the process can't anticipate, or were fixes to problems that have already been patched. It's a lot like systems engineering -- when you go to a new codebase and start changing legacy code that looks wrong because you know a better way of doing it. Well... maybe it's not wrong but that way for a reason, and you just don't know it yet.