This is ignoring that the main competition to prizes are large scale research efforts from governments, labs, universities, or some combination of these. Relative to institutional research prizes have a good record, though the best way to see that is to look at more specific and better run awards rather than what Elon Musk and the Prince of Whales are doing with their spotlight time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> > 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.
I agree that research should not be about creating a profitable business stream. This is not what I meant to say. I meant that this creates a constant pressure to find funding, you essentially can never switch off, and you never get to a stage where you can say, ok now I can focus only on research for a while. It also creates an absurd incentive of not taking risks, because if things don't work out you are likely not getting funding again because of the gap in your research output.
> 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.
This is highly dependent on the country and university, but it should also be said that even a 1M startup does not last very long if you are an experimentalist (it often just barely pays to equip your lab with the essentials).
> 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.
I think this is were experiences will differ dramatically between countries. For example in Sweden academics have to find ~50% of their own salary (+80% overhead), some of this can come through extra teaching or adminstrative duties. In Germany a professor in engineering will typically get 1-2 PhD student salaries with their position. What I know is typically done is that you apply for a grant were you have done significant work already (also helps with the feasibility) and then use that grant to do research to apply for the next grant. Institutional funding plays a very minor role typically.
> 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.
Actually this was not meant to be scare quotes, I put the quotes because researchers is such a broad term (there are a researchers in industry or the big national research labs, where much of what I said does not apply to the same degree).
> 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.
I don't know where you are but most research grants projects I'm aware of don't last for 10 years (5 is already considered long, 3 is much more common for ones I'm aware of). That said, I think the list of responsibilities is crazy, because generally you can not hire anyone to help out with any of those, and there are the administrative and teaching duties that are on top of that. No wonder that most academics work well over 60h per week.
>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.
See and there I disagree. The above responsibilities actually lead to the least risk taking possible. If you constantly need to convince people that what you're doing is great, based on somewhat arbitrary metrics which typically do not reflect the actual importance of the research, then you get academics optimising for short term metrics.
>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.
I agree, project management designing a research project etc. are important parts of aspects of research. However, getting research funding should be a means to an end. What I often observe is that obtaining research funding becomes the end goal, largely because of necessity.
>> 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.
I should clarify, I'm writing this from the inside I am a research academic, have attracted significant funding etc.. I also agree that outside solutions are often very much missing the mark, in particular solutions from communities like HN who often look for quick technical solutions for social problems.
>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.
The issue I have is that we have seen in fact seen strong changes in research funding over the last decades. The ratio of competitive vs non-competitive (institutional...) funding has increased strongly in most western countries I'm aware of. At the same time reporting responsibilities and the importance of metrics has become bigger as well. All this based on the reasoning that there needs to be accountability for the money the government spend on research. I think we are seeing the failures of these changes now.
> It also creates an absurd incentive of not taking risks, because if things don't work out you are likely not getting funding again because of the gap in your research output.
I think the root problem here is not that money is needed to do research, but that negative results don't advance an academic career and actually hinder the ability to get future monies. It's a very hard landing if you take too big of a risk.
Honestly I think needing to constantly get external approval for one's research is a very helpful forcing function for academics, who in my experience can be quite... nose down in their work to put it mildly. How can a researcher evaluate the actual importance of their research without larger buy-in from the public? Certainly many think whatever they are working on is of the utmost importance for the world, and they all have quite a long story to tell you how.
> I also agree that outside solutions are often very much missing the mark, in particular solutions from communities like HN who often look for quick technical solutions for social problems.
That's exactly what I was reading into your words, my apologies.
> All this based on the reasoning that there needs to be accountability for the money the government spend on research.
But what's the alternative? We all agree research takes money, and money is limited. We have more research to do than we have money to spend on research. Therefore we can't research everything, and must instead choose how to allocate our limited funds. I suppose at this point we could say that research funds are allocated by a lottery where no one proposes anything. Some people feel the current funding model is akin to a lottery. But I don't think we really live in a world where allocating lots of public money to unseen projects is going to fly. The only alternative then seems to be that researchers should put forth a description of their proposed research agenda so we can discern one project from the next...
You see where I'm going with this? Every attempt I've seen to revamp the funding process inevitably reinvents it, or tries to turn it into a corporate profit-seeking model. We already have that, so I don't think we need to duplicate it in another context.
