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

OT: Opinion Center

[cain]

What the hell is up with the new "Opinion Center" thingy? It looks like I can minimize it, but I cannot. The one and only link, labeled "intel" is actully a doubleclick.net link. On the right a mouse-over pops up a huge ugly green window which contains an "article" by the "OSTG Marketing Dept." Advertising creeps in more and more. Obnoxious.

WTF?

Re:Classic catch-22

[Red Flayer]

Academics are already very busy, and finding time to post summaries is going to be difficult.

That's what undergrad research assistants are for. It's also something that could easily fall under a university's PR budget -- loading the site with contributions from your organization looks pretty good to prospective students and their parents, let alone companies who are interested in co-funding research.

Bell labs was an artifact of scamming regulations.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

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.

Bell Labs was an artifact of an attempt to scam government regulation.

AT&T was allowed, as part of its monopoly grant by the Fed, to set telephone rates so they made about 6% on all the money they spent on building the system. That included research on how to do telephony better.

So they set up Bell Labs to spend money on research with some tenuous connection to telephony. For every dollar they spent they could effectively bill phone users $1.06 and add six cents to the bottom line.

So Bell Labs did all sorts of research - not just applied research, but basic research - though always with some plausible telephony connection, of course.

And the hysterical thing about it is that, as a scam, it was a total failure. It turns out that basic research comes up with LOTS of useful stuff - just not necessarily something you could anticipate before you start and explain to the PHBs to justify the expense. From year one (until a recent point far post-disvestiture when some Boston Business School types finally looted it by scrapping the research projects for short-term profitability) Bell Labs research made more for the company (in process savings, licensing fees, and the like) than it cost them.

But financially it was still a win of cosmic proportions - both for its owners and for humanity.

Basic research is REALLY good stuff economically. It's just that you can't say what the benefits will be until you actually make the discoveries...