I decided to share a little update.

I’ve completed the course “Spaces of Research Activity.” I personally enjoyed it, although I missed interaction with other students — either from previous or future cohorts. Maybe that’s because the course had just started.

For me, it was important to understand how social structures for research activity exist today, confirm whether my understanding of their effectiveness is correct, learn about alternatives, and assess how realistic they are and what their potential impact might be.

In principle, I got certain answers, and even many colleagues in academia confirmed at least the premises laid out for finding more effective structures and methods for organizing research work.

What I really liked was the approach of what I’ll call “the institute as an accelerator,” where the institute:

  1. Takes on the bureaucratic paperwork for grant applications and documentation (which takes up no small part of research work)
  2. Provides a different distribution of research outcomes (РИД — results of intellectual activity). Currently, these typically belong to the institute or university under contract, while the individual researcher is left with, as a rule, only authorship. I feel this reduces motivation to do science within these institutions — you need to eat, and salaries in science aren’t particularly large, which leads to the need to combine research with other work, which can significantly degrade results.
  3. Focuses on the needs of external clients and funding. This is a complex topic, and I think the core problem lies here; the rest are important but solvable questions. How to find those endowment funds allocated for solving a large pool of questions, so that from that expert knowledge you can create a working product that generates revenue.

So the scheme looks like this:

  1. An endowment fund selects and allocates money for research on a certain agenda (10–20 years).
    1. Ideally, this should be a list of problems — the more painful they are, the more relevant the agenda.
  2. The winner researches and accumulates expert knowledge (see my post on what science is).
  3. This expert knowledge is used to solve applied problems.
    1. Problem-solving — which gets patented.
    2. Finding engineering ways to implement the solutions.

Overall, I would very much like to organize a discussion or roundtable on this topic — to exchange opinions and knowledge about it.

This post is a translation of the original Russian version: Про завершение курса по исследовательской деятельности