Blue Sky Funk

Yesterday I found an interesting article in the ‘Education for Hire’ section of largest fishwrapper that we have here in Australia.

Note bene, I was trapped in a metal tube 30,000 feet above my usually preferred elevation and had little else to do; I can assure you this is not my usual pastime.

This magical article was written by the son of a former colleague. He, the son, is an academic in Sydney and he wants more grant money so he can do what the hell he wants in his research endeavours, and without having to write pesky grants I suspect.

Here is a redacted version of his article with much of the meanderings extracted. My shorter version is much easier to absorb – effectively I have taken the article and turned it into a blog (oh, to be able to automate this and retain the guts of the message!).

“Blue-sky research involves a particularly big leap of faith — the belief that backing investigator-led research will generate paradigm shifts that, in the long-term, will repay the investment many times over…..History shows this approach is critically important for creating new industries…..Sadly this new political climate is gradually driving the emphasis away from investigator-led research towards mission-directed research…..we should start talking about a bipartisan science strategy that serves the national interest and includes a prominent commitment to blue-sky science.”

Redacting it a second time, this time from a blog entry into a Tweet, I get “Blue-sky research …serves…blue-sky science”

Sadly (the author used that word and I like it) the logic doesn’t stack up for one very simple reason.

The history that shows us that blue-sky research is sometimes critically important for creating new industries is unfortunately not Australian. Not once, not ever, has a new Australian industry emerged from blue-sky research efforts – whether that blue-sky research was done here or elsewhere.

In fact, if we were to fund these delusions of blue-sky outcomes, and by some miracle there was a blue-sky outcome (as opposed to some nicely equipped labs, a bunch of largely unread but highly cited papers and a bevy of overseas plenary talks) I can assure you that the benefits of this blue-sky outcome would flow to US industry.

I have a better idea … why do we not just scout the universities in the rest of the world for a blue-sky outcome and steal it in the interests of (ha ha) developing a new industry here in Club Oz?

This would be much cheaper than funding the blue-sky research in the first place. Especially considering that the IRR on funding blue-sky research must down around minus infinity, or at the very least, at the most left hand end of all financial return curves ever seen by the naked eye.

I can actually think of a much better argument for changing the funding for university research than this blue-sky dreaming:

How about we just award grant money to academics to do research but not for specific projects at all? No project plans, no project titles – just a one-line request for cash. The academics can then choose to spend their money on blue-sky research, or turn-the-handle research, as they choose.

I can’t for the life of me see the logic in asking an academic to outline what they plan to do with the money as if they were an engineer building a bridge. It’s a waste of time and money, especially since nobody gives a stuff about current research outcomes anyway.

Asking for project plans is simply a charade designed to suggest that grants are awarded on project merit, when in most cases they are awarded on academic reputation and past record.

If we stopped asking researchers for project plans as part of awarding grants the question would arise as to how to judge the merits of their requests? I would say just give them all a bit of seed money early on in their careers and give more and more funding to those that show they can do well with it, regardless of whether they choose to do blue-sky or mundane research.

But, and here is the key point, if we let the academics off this hook most of them would probably do the same research that they are doing now – turning the handle, so to speak – and not blue-sky research. Why? Well, this lower risk type of research has the benefits of being easier to manage and giving guaranteed outcomes whereas genuine blue-sky exploratory research is hard and runs the risk of having no reportable results.

Only the academics confident that they could pull off blue-sky research would dare spend their money this way because if they weren’t successful their future chances of getting funded would be reduced.

This is, after all, how the business world works – rewarding those that can demonstrate past success. That is, a meritocratic pyramid.

And being successful at blue-sky research requires many skills apart from being functionally effective at research. For example I can think of these skills – managing risk, having luck, the student selection and management process, being able to play university politics effectively, scientific communications, genuine insight, a solid grounding in the field, creativity, and the list goes on.

Success begets success. In a system where there is a statistical number of researchers, the rewarding of success will be the most effective means for getting the best outcomes, even if there is a small number of unfairly treated individuals. This is as it is in all human reward systems.