The IT Century

Paraphrasing a recent chat with some university senior manager types:

I said to them that if their university really wanted to rise up the rankings then my suggestion is that all their research becomes IT focused.

I picked chemistry by way of example.

There’s a global chemical industry and supply chain. And then there is chemistry departments in universities training chemists and also doing research in the discipline of chemistry.

I proposed that all the chemistry research at the university change to the development of IT technologies for use in the chemical sector and that there be no research in the discipline of chemistry itself because it has a much lower IRR and the benefits to society and industry are really quite incremental compared to the benefits of applying new IT technologies to the chemical sector.

This shift to IT focused research could occur right across the university and within no time the university would be the most relevant university within thousands of miles.

This suggestion is based on the fact that we are in the IT century. The relevance and return on non-IT research is much much lower.

This transition had already occurred in the venture capital sector where 99% of current investment is in IT. Real tech accounts for 1% (for example, where the product contains hardware device but usually using off the shelf technology), and there are virtually no science based start-ups being funded anywhere.

PS the photo below has zero relevance to this thesis but even so it’s far more useful than, say, Australian university research into the free radical kinetics of emulsion polymerisation.