Decouple, graphically

A few days ago I wrote a brief post about decoupling academic research from industrial development. A few people have asked me about it; it seems that I didn’t make it clear enough.

Look at this picture:

My R&D Model

 

This picture corresponds to an ideal world, not to our reality. In the diagram, circles represent activities and rectangles represent entities. The three large coloured rectangles represent the dynamics of individuals (blue), academic research (green) and industrial development (red). Solid arrows depict the sequence of activities, and dashed arrows depict contents (such as information or things) being deposited into or taken from entities.

Decouple

Galicia will duplicate its number of scientists in four years.

That’s what El Pais says on 20 December 2006. The new Galician Plan for Innovation, Science and Technology 2006-2010, just presented to the public, will spend 800 million € in order to create its own “Silicon Valley”, foster private funding of research and create several technology centres. The report mentions that an “investors’ club”, based on the concept of “business angels” imported straight from the USA, will be created for this purpose. Oh my god.

Why can’t they see that they are screwing up an already screwed up situation?

I have already talked about this here and here. To say it again and summarise: industry is made of private companies. Private companies have the primary goal of making profit, and therefore will only participate in research that is more or less guaranteed to bring money in. This means low risk, tight control and reduced exploration of the solution space. Precisely the opposite of what research is. Research, in order to obtain results, needs high risk, loose control and free exploration of the solution space.

Subscriptions

I have just added a new cool feature to the blog. You will see a new menu item on the top left corner of the screen, “Subscriptions”. You will also see that the link bar under each post, in addition to the old “Permalink”, “Comments”, etc., now shows a new “Subscribe” option.

Subscriptions let you enter your email, select the posts or post categories you are interested in, and voilà. You will receive an automatic email notification each time that something interesting happens.

If you are interested in following a particular post, click on “Subscribe” on the link bar under it and enter your email. From that moment on, you will receive an email notification each time the post changes or a comment is added to it.