Should Applied Research Funding Go To Startups or Academia?

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 <i>look</i> bad, and not to actually make good decisions!<p>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!<p>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.

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

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.<p>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.

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.<p>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.

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.

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.

Un-ask the question.<p>Please first explain why there should be such a thing as "applied research funding".

Oh, someone <i>else</i> wants to hate on academia?