Let’s take a prominent example. The European Research Council awards the most prestigious grants in Europe. Obtaining one is a golden ticket to a tenured academic position. Universities arrange courses on how to write a successful application and hire consultants to support this. Academics are assessing lists of past grantees to see how to position their research and steer toward “ERC-compatible” research. And above all, they spend months writing a proposal, with a funding success rate of a bit above 10 percent. The European Union is claiming the ERC as one of the biggest success stories in its Research and Innovation programs. And universities are fully aligning themselves with this culture.
Is that wise? True, ERC excels at establishing and cementing the careers of so-called elite researchers, but that’s only within its own academic definition. Does it actually bolster European competitiveness in the real world?
Where’s the real-world impact?
Let’s take a look at the numbers. Since 2007, the program has funded over 17,000 projects, generating over 200,000 scientific papers. This research led to 2,200 patents and other intellectual property rights applications. That means only 1 percent of all the results are actually useful as IP. The grantees furthermore founded 400 startups. That’s only 2 percent of all projects leading to an entrepreneurial venture. This is in spite of the fact that these projects tend to attract the best students and are carried out at the best universities. Where’s the real-world impact? These innovation indicators are extremely low, if you ask me.
These numbers look pretty low, indeed. One should do better, especially in applied fields where the impact should be immediate.
I work in extremely fundamental physics. Lots of its research from the last 100 years has been forgotten. Pointless or just intellectual masturbation. But the research that sticked has changed the course of humanity. And often, it was built on the failures of the research that came before it.
This type of research does not get measured in number of patents or start-ups. Even if most, if not all, of today's start-ups are built on that tech from the last 500 years. If not for academia, there are not many places that are inventivized to do research that may only turn out useful in 50 years.
Take quantum physics. The abstract stuff. Like entanglement and superposition. Not just the appliied stuff like tunneling through a wall. The abstract stuff has been an intellectual curiosity, mostly. Yet, in the last decade, IBM, Google and others are pumping billions in it trying to make useful quantum computers. That's possible thanks to the academic research that preceded it. I remember giving a talk 20 years ago on quantum computers and qubits (I'm no expert, i was just interested in it). The audience laughed, the people where not ready for it. Even amidst academics.
But the few that did fundamental research on this, did it out of passion. Or maybe the foresaw the future, who knows. In any event, it was research that is only now starting to pay off. Good thing these things didn't't get patented. I'm generally against IP, but that's for another time. I've already gone enough on a tangent with my rant.
ERC grants are notoriously hard to get. I failed once. So, at least, one would expect them to pay off. This kind of piece reminding about how the system sometimes falls is useful, hence the share. Just felt like adding some personal thoughts to counter the clickbaity title.