Freeing the Good Stuff From University Labs

netbuzz writes "University research labs are not supposed to be like Vegas: What happens in them is not supposed to stay there. A nonprofit from the Kauffman Innovation Network launching yesterday at DEMO 07 aims to free the fruits of academic research that would otherwise sit trapped on university shelves. Bonus: the site translates academic-speak into English.

Comments

Classic catch-22

[kebes]

Well, the idea is fine: create a site where academics can post plain-English summaries of their research, and where companies can go looking for people doing research in a particular field. Thus it helps to link-up those who have well-defined problems to others who are working on well-defined solutions. This allows companies to either find research they can start funding (because they want the results), or, in the case of more mature research, to find research patents that they want to license.

So far, so good. It's a good idea precisely because it is simple. The problem, however, is that there is little reason, at present, for either academics or companies to use this site. The site will only become useful once it has built up a significant community of users. Only then will it be useful to either side.

Academics are already very busy, and finding time to post summaries is going to be difficult. They will only do it if there is a good chance that some company will take notice. Likewise companies are not going to waste time looking through a small database of random research results.

So it's a catch-22 where no one is going to use the thing until it's useful; hence it will never become useful. Perhaps with their startup money they will pay people to start inputting findings, at least until the network reaches a critical mass. But until the site has a big enough of a following, you're going to have a hard time gaining visibility. This is same problem alot of "networking" sites have: it's hard to build up a big community. What they really need is to figure out some way to make the site useful, even while it is small in size.

Re:Classic catch-22

[penguinbroker]

I agree that the idea has potential to be incredibly useful. But this is highly contingent on the quality and consistency of the "community tagging" that this services hopes to exploit. Working in research labs at a reputable engineering research university I find that the most difficult thing is formulating your problem into discernable parts. Once you formulate the problem into 'academic speak' so to say, finding the solution (or finding if there already is a solution) is straight forward. That's kind of the whole point of 'academic speak,' to give consistency to the way all this research is described so that there is a way to connect ideas between different projects. Also, what kind of credibility will these community tags hold? Is it really going to be that much more informative than the latest textbooks? If I'm into programming parallel distributed robotic systems, shouldn't I just read the latest releases from conferences like the AAAI? Tangent note, from the perspective of a computer science major, I would like to see this embracing of descriptive community tags applied to something like Google's code search tool. It'd be great to say something like "I want a script that takes as input X, and outputs Y." This is because the programming community benefits the most (at least the most quickly) from collaboration, ie Rosetta Codes mantra of "don't reinvent the wheel."

I want to see some patent protection

[drinkypoo]

No private corporation should ever be able to patent anything developed with my tax money. Why is THAT allowed to continue? I'm tired of paying for companies' research for them. In fact I'd say that this state of affairs is why more public companies don't bother to do major research. They know they can get the same stuff done for free (or for much cheaper anyway) by a University someplace, using our tax dollars.

Re:I want to see some patent protection

[drinkypoo]

The reason why we allow private entities to commercialize the results of federally-funded research is because the previous situation was so bad -- useful research was just sitting in labs because nobody could make any money off it.

I'm sorry, but I don't believe that a patent is required to make use of this research. The only thing required is that it be made public. A centralized repository of such research would do the job nicely.

Re:I want to see some patent protection

[PriceIke]

US Constitution, Article I, Section 8: To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;

Patent law is DRM for researchers.

Re:Already happening

[The_Wilschon]

researchers typically now conduct their research with an eye toward its commercial practicability.

And you think this is an entirely good thing? Sure it has some good points. The universities get more money quicker. However, the general state of things previously was that academics did pie in the sky research, much of which never winds up being "useful" (although I would argue that increasing our general knowledge is useful...), and then industry would take what it could use from there and develop it for commercial practicability. Notice, however, that industry doing research with an eye toward commercial practicability rarely comes up with the new, ground-breaking, really great stuff. Its all kind of humdrum usage of established knowledge. The great advances (which later enable commercial applications) come from way out there pie in the sky research with no view to commercial practicability.

Of course, there is not a bright line, for instance, Bell Labs back in the day did a lot of research without view to practicability. Bell Labs is famed for being the source of an awful lot of really awesome stuff, too.

I think that Bayh-Dole may very well cause university research to fall into the same boat as industrial research. You won't be able to start a project until you can prove that it will have some commercial application. That's not a good state to be in.

BTW, this "vegas-like attitude" doesn't exist. Nobody in universities actively tries to keep their research to themselves, because that would harm them more than anyone else. Academia runs on reputations, and you can't build up a reputation (and thus get grant money) unless you release your research. The reason that a lot of university research stays in the universities is that nobody comes asking for it. Nearly all research professors are delighted to talk the ear off anyone who shows an interest in their research. So, if you want to know what they are doing, just ask!

Conclusions and academics

[Per Abrahamsen]

It is, in fact, very hard to get academics to conclude anything beyond "this approach shows great promise, and should be investigated further". [ Please give me more money. ]

Of course, a journalist can't use such a non-conclusion to anything, so the few academics who like to use stronger statements (or like to be in the media) are used constantly. So those are the academics the laymen are going to see.