Envisioning a marketplace for research funding

As policy makers with no knowledge of research appear to be on a path to indiscriminate elimination of funding, perhaps cooler heads can prevail to provide advice on optimum policy choices. Systematized funding decisions tend to promote the status-quo and that is inefficient. So, it is clear a change is needed but the real question is how to better organize research funding. Most often market based mechanisms bring the best outcomes.

This is tricky. Fundamental research has low likelihood of success and the overall utility to society on conventional metrics is often unclear. Similarly, incremental improvements to existing knowledge does not have sufficient returns to society. In the middle, there is a graveyard of innovative research, most of which have not shown positive results. This may be due to the fact that innovation requires a combination of disciplines and current funding mechanisms largely focus on silos. To make matters worse, research funding (and recognition) is not driven by meritocracy but rather by who knows whom. At the highest level, one could argue that research funding, publications, and awards are all driven by academic corruption.

A change is needed. But how? Could we establish a marketplace for research funding? The research market could have securities based on ideas trading to give a large swath of interested parties to effectively vote on them. As an example, anything that has “AI,” in the currently proposed research appears to get funded and that is a systematization of the status-quo. If a research funding market opens, wisdom of the crowds can guide research priorities to a more optimal portfolio, dynamically.

A change is needed to how research funding is disbursed. To attempt a better design, it will take people from various disciplines, science and economics included, come together. Politicians will fail as miserably as the current academic funding administrators.