This was a really interesting article on a subject I’d never heard of before, thanks very much. I assume similar issues affect government research organisations in other countries as well.
It seems from your description that part of the problem is that the same body invents projects for itself to work on. Do you think things would be significantly improved if, after coming up with a research project, they had to invite external bids for the project, and only do it in-house if they won the tendering process? Perhaps this would be prohibitively hard to implement in practice.
Sorry if this is misleading in the text. Publicly funded projects are open for bids from almost everyone. Private Companies and other non-profit organizations do do public projects. It is just that not always the best project candidate wins because decisions are not rational. Organizations like Fraunhofer feast on that. There are huge resources devoted to spamming grantmakers with project proposals.
This was a really interesting article on a subject I’d never heard of before, thanks very much. I assume similar issues affect government research organisations in other countries as well.
It seems from your description that part of the problem is that the same body invents projects for itself to work on. Do you think things would be significantly improved if, after coming up with a research project, they had to invite external bids for the project, and only do it in-house if they won the tendering process? Perhaps this would be prohibitively hard to implement in practice.
Sorry if this is misleading in the text. Publicly funded projects are open for bids from almost everyone. Private Companies and other non-profit organizations do do public projects. It is just that not always the best project candidate wins because decisions are not rational. Organizations like Fraunhofer feast on that. There are huge resources devoted to spamming grantmakers with project proposals.