Interesting that the manifesto came from Manchester. I was there until very recently and there is intense pressure to commercialise every project.
However, getting the public to pay twice (first by funding for the research and then for the commercialised product) is a bit cheeky, especially as the university has had to undertake absolutely no risk to produce the product. If universities want to commercialise themselves I feel they must divest themselves from the public purse and accept the consequences of possible failure in the market.
Being a little more general, what model would you propose for funding research? With exceptions (e.g. the Gates foundation) the vast majority of research funding is taxpayer funded, and replacing that source is pretty much impossible. Now how that funding system works is another story.
Research should that's publicly funded should be given back to the public. To put it another way, the public should, as a condition of giving out money to researchers, require that the results of that research belong to the public.
If the public gives you an NSF grant then your papers/articles should be released via a Creative Commons license (or similar) in addition to being published in a journal. Your data should be immediately available to other universities and researchers. Any products you engineer should be in the public domain.
There's a lot more to building a university spin-off company and a successful product than just completing the original research. The research grant is like seed funding in this case. The university benefits from its involvement, which means its students benefit. Not to mention that the possibility of starting a spin-off company is a motivator to do great research. Do you really want to take all this away?
Sure, a lot of research ends up just sitting there, unused. Some of this is because of licensing, but not always. Most research results are quite experimental, and just can't be used in their raw form to make a product. They are useful for further research though. And no one is disallowing researchers to study and cite previous work.
I'm not saying the system is perfect. But it might be better to proceed with small changes, rather than trying to revolutionize research overnight.
>> the possibility of starting a spin-off company is a motivator to do great research
There's appallingly little rational justification for what you're saying, or historical evidence. Oxford, for example, has done nothing but slip down international rankings since diverting its focus from its international academic reputation towards commercialisation.
The science of motivation, meanwhile, seems to operate on very different lines to the ones you assume in making that statement:
http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html
In my experience researchers are already motivated to do great research - the whole citation/impact scoring system they compete in already has plenty of external motivation to add to their internal one, and unlike financial external motivation you advocate, this system is fully geared towards producing quality research
Don't forget these are often quite selfless people, and they certainly don't often have the distractions of directing their work down low-risk, high commercial viability channels. They wear socks and sandals, not suits, and do PhDs, not MBAs - and their research is just fine, thanks very much. Better they stay motivated as they are, and not have to face onerous intellectual property blocks to going about their work, than the opposite you advocate as being more productive.
However, we see that a lot of great researchers are being motivated to leave research because the financial markets and large corporations can offer salaries 3-4x those available to people in universities, while working fewer hours. By allowing people to exploit some of their work for commercial gain, you offer an amount of freedom and potential economic gain that corporations cannot. And often, the university gets some of the money from the company that gets ploughed back into research. So the university gets some money, the researchers get some extra benefit from staying in the university system and are usually motivated by the university to share the results of their work in some sense - not the commercial secrets, perhaps, but the pure science behind what has been done. They then continue to produce results that can be shared with the public.
Everyone wins - the university gets more money, the researchers stay in science and produce more results and the public gets the benefit of having the most driven, creative people staying inside the university system producing public gain rather than private gain.
The citation/impact scoring system offers no motivation to do 'great' research, in my experience. Rather, it offers a lot of motivation to do the administrative work that gets your name on papers with little to no risk, rewarding networking skills and knowledge of the system over any great creative insight. In fact, I would say that this requirement to have citations and impact statements actively drives away the people who are most likely to do the research.
I don't think that universities should focus on commercial exploitation, that's for sure. It's not fair to private companies, it's not fair to students and it's not fair to taxpayers who fund the university system. But stereotyping anyone who is good at research as a selfless, socks-and-sandals proto-hippy shows a certain lack of familiarity with a large cross-section of researchers. And to say that the culture of research that we have right now is just fine? Wow. The way I see research right now, the science 'managers' get rewarded and long term research is put at risk by political meddling at the highest levels. Of course, we may come from completely different cultures.
Yes. For example, the NIH requires research to be published in open-access journals, many of which also now require data to be made public. These requirements look like they will be everywhere sooner or later. (Don't know of any restrictions about commercializing results, though.)
Perhaps the university could receive an endowment and then leave the public sector. I know that taxpayers fund R&D too in the private sector with tax rebates and the like so the situation isn't clear cut between the public and private sector.
I'm actually advocating that universities should release their IP into the public domain rather than profit from it. Would this preclude another Google from happening? I don't know. I guess there will be strong arguments against this and I'm happy to hear them in case I've not thought this out all too well :D
That I don't disagree with per se. The tech transfer process is something that definitely needs to be modified. ibridge networks has a model that I find quite interesting and is along the lines of making pools of technology available that might be commercialized (not all university research, in fact only a small percentage can be commercialized).
The logical thing to do is set up a system in which the government invests in projects, and gets some kind of stake similar to equity so it can recoup some of that tax money for reinvestment (or whatever purpose).
Depends on your premises. Another logically consistent solution would be to have the government invest in research, and allow anyone to use the findings.
I like this idea a lot more. There is some subtlety about 'public' vs 'government' involved. As a rule, I don't think governments should be out to make money on behalf of the public. They should be out to convert money into public benefits. Freely available intellectual property is definitely such a benefit.
"As a rule, I don't think governments should be out to make money on behalf of the public. They should be out to convert money into public benefits."
Nailing it. This makes the difference between a proper government and a sovereign corporation that, due to a historical accident, you are forced to pay your taxes to.
They get that on a successful product anyway regardless of whether they funded the research (the idea of commercial taxes being that they pay for industrial and fiscal infrastructure including IP enforcement). In other words there's no incentive for the taxpayer to subsidize research on that basis, whereas shorter patent terms or something would bring benefits back to the public sooner than otherwise.
What about research that isn't successfully commercialized? It just sits there until the patent expires...
If someone gives you money to conduct research or develop a product, it's completely reasonable to expect that they will want to profit directly (not indirectly) when you succeed.
In this case, the "someone" is everyone.
If a university or researcher doesn't like those terms, that's ok. Just ask someone else.
Unfortunately in a lot of cases, someone else cannot do the job. And certainly not for the money that is offered by most universities. Go ahead and find me someone who can write C and C++ and Python and Java well, do complicated mathematics, understand quantum field theory/genetics/taxonomy/quantum optics/nuclear engineering/etc., manage large research projects, teach classes of 50-100 students a few times a week (having prepared all the material!) and is willing to do all this 60-70 hours a week every year of their career for $80k-$100k/year, after investing 10+ years of the adulthood in an expensive education. Plus, until you ahve tenure, you can never be certain of a job for more than a year or two, and will need to travel regularly both in the job, and just to find work.
Financial firms and large corps. are sucking good researchers out of the university system. For those that are motivated by the material gain available in those organisations, allowing them to exploit a tiny fraction of their work keeps them producing the rest of their work for everyone else. There was a great quote on here a few weeks agoa long the lines of 'There are plenty of scientists, the government just isn't willing to pay market rate.' Allowing spin-off companies and the exploitation of some research is one way that the universities can keep those scientists within the system.
This freedom to innovate without risk is part of what makes universities valuable. There are already plenty of companies that innovate under market conditions. It's important to also have a place where more blue-sky research, of the sort that wouldn't get green-lit in a corporate environment, can happen.
The other side of that coin might be that this risk free piblic funding should be used to for the type of blue sky research stuff that won't get funded by corporations, not stuff that corporations might fund anyway.
On the other hand, you don't want a review board to say: "That looks like it could be useful, so we are going to withdraw your funding."
Something could be branded, "has no commercial applications," simply by lack of imagination. We want to keep imagination alive in blue sky research :-)
Robert Laughlin, Stanford Physics Professor and Nobel Laureate, reaches many of the same conclusions in his book,The Crime of Reason: And the Closing of the Scientific Mind (http://tinyurl.com/ydfyozk).
However, getting the public to pay twice (first by funding for the research and then for the commercialised product) is a bit cheeky, especially as the university has had to undertake absolutely no risk to produce the product. If universities want to commercialise themselves I feel they must divest themselves from the public purse and accept the consequences of possible failure in the market.