I head incubation projects for a social good incubator run by Steve Levitt at UChicago. I also publish the Engineering Innovation Newsletter on Substack.
If I could make wishes come true, I’d be president of MIT or run the NSF. But my tier 2 dream would be to help run a large academic lab or applied R&D lab one day.
https://freaktakes.substack.com/s/engineering-innovation
Hmmmmm this is particularly interesting because, if the setback was really a recruiting problem, it breaks the problem down in a way I hadn’t thought about. Because when most people deal with this question they treat it as kind of a “are there currently good people there? Yes or no?” But your question implies a different formulation.
Not just “are there good people at the department right now?” But also, “how likely is that department to treat good people well/retain them if they do good work?”
This is quite interesting. Because if we could start to find some rough answers to how important the expectations piece is, that could possibly shed some light on how to:
Recruit top scientists to departments/orgs/research areas that are not currently top-tier but looking to build up towards the future
And the more impactful, less zero-sum topic of maybe there are ways to use whatever we learn to get more talented potential researchers into academic departments in the first place.
I’m sure we all know people who gave up possible top-flight academic careers for the private sector not just because of the paycheck, but also because they didn’t really have any faith in the academic institutions/ecosystem as a whole treating them well.
Would love to know anyone’s thoughts or if there are interesting papers to start running down this rabbit hole on!
This first paper, by B&G, is such a fascinating piece of data collection work. You’re absolutely right. Do you have any rough guesses on how much of the issue is building a course of research on niche capital itself vs. the kind of person who does that kind of thing. I’m sure they both have an effect. I ask because I would be not shocked if the hypothesis, “People usually only pursue a course of research that requires specialized equipment if they are extremely dedicated to that problem over all others/that is an area of clear comparative advantage to them and they don’t believe they can contribute as much to other areas.”
That might be mere conjecture though and I’m not one to lend too much credibility to personal hunches without evidence. Do you think there’s any work that can help us think through that question? Even if tangentially. As much as it can feel like it sometimes, a paper does not exist for everything.
Hey Ben! I loved this. Particularly the anecdotes about Boulton and the early and late life of Edison Electric.
Since reading the Edison biography, something I’ve been thinking about is whether or not someone could start a modern-day R&D lab the way Edison did. Like I understand that it would be atypical, but I feel like someone with a particular set of skills and the ability to execute (whose mind also moves a mile a minute the way weird minds do) should be able to.
There are certain technical problems, that if solved, are either worth a ton of money as their own company or just licensing the IP to existing players in the field.
As a concrete example: What if one started an R&D lab dedicated to making superforecasting as effective as possible. You’re working on trying to figure out what you can and can’t predict, how to make your best predictors even better, and how to communicate these predictions in as clear a way as a consultant would communicate in a deck. At that point, your services could be worth huge amounts to companies trying to make projections and hedge funds trying to make trades. Or you could start a hedge fund yourself.
Why do little applied research shops like that, with clear commercial applications in a medium amount of time once some expertise is built up, not exist? Are people just not doing it or is there a structural reason? Any ideas?