History and Past Activities
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History and Past Activities |
Grit Laudel
Australian National University, Canberra, Australia, grit@coombs.anu.edu.au
Marriages of inconvenience: Why researchers conduct contract research
Contract research for industry is a rather traditional way of commercialization. However, new trends may emerge in this area because of industry's growing interest in research and because of a shifting balance between public and private money. Thus, the question must be asked under what conditions and for what reasons researchers turn to contract research for industry; and whether different knowledge is produced where industry's money dominates the financial basis of ‘publicly funded’ research.
To answer it, an empirical study on the financial conditions of university research in Germany and Australia was conducted. Researchers from university research groups in experimental physics were asked to describe how their research is funded; how they choose their sources of funding, and how the anticipation of funding decisions affects their project design.
The results show that the decrease of public money makes it difficult for researchers to maintain the continuity of their ‘research trails’. In Germany, decreasing block funding (i.e. funding that researchers don't have to apply for) brings more and more researchers into a situation where they can't conduct any research without applying for project funding. Increasing numbers of applications lead to decreasing success rates. Consequently, for many scientists industry becomes the last resort. As a consequence, access to money rather than the content of projects becomes the reason to do contract research. In Australian universities, the pressure is lower because block funding is still sufficient to conduct some research.
As a result of the mounting financial pressure at German universities, it becomes difficult to pursue research programs. Instead, patchworks of projects are created whose patterns are shaped by access to funds. A comparison between research groups in Germany and Australia shows that there is a critical level of block funding that is necessary to pursue long-term goals and to secure the quality of research.
Sociology of Science and Technology NETwork - last update: April 2006