

Should Applied Research Funding Go To Startups or Academia? - bmahmood
http://blog.scienceexchange.com/2012/07/should-applied-funding-go-to-academia-or-startups/

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jayzee
This is a great post on a topic that is quite close to our hearts since we are
a science-startup as well. I think that this situation is a symptom of the
mentality, 'You can't be fired for buying IBM.' It is so much easier to give
money to a research group at Harvard etc than 2 guys starting out from an
apartment. Especially in a bureaucratic setting where your job is to make
decisions that do not _look_ bad, and not to actually make good decisions!

Adam and I were once on a call with an academic consortium that had received
~$15M in funding from ARAA. The objective of this group was quite similar to
what we are doing with our startup. This group reached out to us too see if
there was a way we could work together. During the conference call it was Adam
and me on our side and at least 10 researchers from institutions all over the
US on the other side!

Those were the early days of our startup and we thought that we would be
obliterated by them with their vast resources. It turns out that with 1/10th
their funding we have done more than 10x of what they did. And they are
floundering while we are just warming up.

~~~
cantankerous
I'm curious, does your science startup do applied research or does it sell a
product related to the support of scientific research?

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jayzee
the later... support scientific research

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alberich
supporting scientific research is considered applied scientific research?

~~~
jayzee
the post discusses funding for science-related startups broadly... including
examples referring to academia.edu etc. i am responding to the contents of the
post not just the title.

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Irishsteve
Applied research is nothing new, sure isn't that what PARC was? Commercial
labs still exist, and in many different fields. (I know PARC was Xerox, but
now they take on proof of concept work from externals)

The real problem is how do you identify particular groups or commercial labs
to approach, so that they can complete your work.

Research money is quite risky because you are asking for someone to achieve
something that does not yet exist. You have a good probability of running out
of money before something comes back to you.

~~~
cantankerous
This. A huge reason why some guy in his basement isn't able to pull down
grants is because he doesn't have the resources or the record to justify the
grant award. Research funding is a risky "business" (it's not really a
business) with a high failure rate.

I can't help but feel that this article reads like a combination of sour
grapes and a pitch to avoid academic institutions because of a bunch of tired,
overgeneralized ideals.

If a team has a track record of delivering, then they usually continue to get
the grants. That's how it works, for better or worse. Part of the way you
break into research is by joining the good teams before charging off on your
own...or publishing something of note. While it has its problems, I think most
people would be hard pressed to come up with a completely better approach
without its own set of equivalent drawbacks.

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qq66
The returns to academic funding are extremely high and if anything, MORE
government money should be funding academic research. The strong funding for
academic research is one of the principal reasons for the US' level of
scientific and technological success.

For-profit business already have well-established funding channels, namely
angel investors and venture capitalists. Government doesn't do a good job of
investing in startups (Solyndra?) and should stay out of it.

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PaulHoule
arxiv.org is perhaps the only successfully community to come out of academia
and it was successful precisely because it wasn't funded... all of the early
work was done on stolen time so there was no BS having to do with grants, etc.

Back when I was involved with arxiv.org we had 1/8 the budget of some people
next door who'd build a huge portal that had essentially no end users. Perhaps
we could have done so much more if we'd had more money, but practice shows
that academics will eat the money up and deliver very little for it.

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fjorder
Hi Paul, I'm a researcher who uses arxiv daily and I love it. I love it to the
point that I sometimes wonder if it could become more than it is. Did anyone
involved with arxiv ever toy with the idea of attaching message boards to
papers in which the papers could be discussed? i.e. One of the links from the
abstract page could be to a message board specifically for discussing that
paper.

One of the worst things about the peer review process at journals is the lag
and one-way nature of communication between authors and referees. It is
tremendously frustrating to have one referee torpedo the whole process because
he/she has interpreted the paper incorrectly. I'd love to see somebody try to
replace the traditional referee process with something like an invitation-only
forum so that authors and referees can interact in a timely basis with
anonymity preserved. Arxiv could do a variation of this by creating a forum
open to users who have published papers on the arxiv (just to weed out
spammers). This could provide rapid feedback to strengthen papers as well as a
place to collect answers to questions from readers.

Cheers!

~~~
PaulHoule
Well, I can give two answers to this.

(1) arXiv.org is amazingly successfully because people use it and love it.
However, the low funding of arXiv.org also means that arXiv.org has missed
many opportunities. Had we gotten 4x the funding we got, and spent it well, we
might have come to dominate several more academic fields and we could have
launched some awesome features.

(2) I think we could have solved the problem of "non-scientists" commenting,
but there's also the problem that the physics community is very snarky. What
if, say, a grad student writing his first paper gets a really nasty comment by
one of the luminaries in the field? We didn't want to get involved in all the
suffering that would have entailed.

You're totally right about the ineffectiveness of peer review and that was a
subject that we talked about a lot. Some service for giving feedback to papers
and evaluating their significance could have been a great help. Yet, a serious
investigation of this could reveal that many of the assumptions about how
science works may be wrong.

For instance, we found that by far, the papers on arXiv.org that are of most
enduring interest are review papers. Like the U.S. patent system, scientific
publishing fetishizes being the first to do something, not the first to do it
right. Similarly, the idea of "reproduction" is core to what people say the
scientific method is, but almost no scientific results are reproduced and many
or most would not be reproducable if somebody tried.

Remember, despite peer review, the median scientific paper is wrong.

~~~
elizabethiorns
I totally agree with you and congratulations on creating such a widely used
and transformative product, I hope that in time biology will also adopt the
arXiv model.

I also agree with your point about reproducibility - it is another passion of
mine which I have written about here:
[http://blog.scienceexchange.com/2012/04/the-need-for-
reprodu...](http://blog.scienceexchange.com/2012/04/the-need-for-
reproducibility-in-academic-research/)

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vshade
The important thing is that public funded research should have public
available results. I fail to see how to keep the results public available and
remaining a competitive startup.

~~~
alexshye
It's not that simple though. It is fairly well known that results from
academic publications should often be taken with a grain of salt. For example,
a 15% performance improvement in a simulator may mean 1% in a real system. So
in many cases, the idea is what is interesting, and the results are suspect.
In a startup, the idea is publicly viewable in many cases, and the result is
also publicly viewable (success/failure). Obviously, these things are
different, but I'm just trying to say there is a gray area here.

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thejteam
In the US at least there is always SBIR(Small Business Innovation
Research)funding. Most of it is through the DOD, but other federal agencies
includimg the NSF participate as well. The NSF grants are pretty open-ended.
Come up with an idea in their broad categories and submit a proposal. it helps
greatly to have a PhD on your team as the initial Principal Investgator, but
at least for the DOD awards is certainly not strictly required.

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neutronicus
My advisor owns a company that was funded almost entirely by SBIR's for the
first several years of its existence. Sales (of a very expensive physics
simulation package) have picked up recently, though.

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tjic
Un-ask the question.

Please first explain why there should be such a thing as "applied research
funding".

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cantankerous
Well there's always applications in defense. That's probably the biggest
single source of applied research funding in the United States from the
federal government.

~~~
tensor
Probably followed by applied medical research.

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eli_gottlieb
Oh, someone _else_ wants to hate on academia?

