Research teams seem more likely to realize their full disruptive potential if the researchers do not have to do anything but research and have easy access to all the resources they need.
Note that Richard Hamming disagreed with this. He makes the point that restricted resources force creativity, and the best breakthroughs come through this creativity. I think he has got a point, but I’m not sure what they all-things-considered conclusion should be. I think the ‘constraints breed creativity’ applies more to the tools people work with, and other constraints like teaching, administrative tasks, and grant applications mostly waste time.
Here’s an excerpt form his famous talk on research (for individual researchers, not teams):
What most people think are the best working conditions, are not. Very clearly they are not because people are often most productive when working conditions are bad. One of the better times of the Cambridge Physical Laboratories was when they had practically shacks—they did some of the best physics ever.
I give you a story from my own private life. Early on it became evident to me that Bell Laboratories was not going to give me the conventional acre of programming people to program computing machines in absolute binary. It was clear they weren’t going to. But that was the way everybody did it. I could go to the West Coast and get a job with the airplane companies without any trouble, but the exciting people were at Bell Labs and the fellows out there in the airplane companies were not. I thought for a long while about, ``Did I want to go or not?″ and I wondered how I could get the best of two possible worlds. I finally said to myself, ``Hamming, you think the machines can do practically everything. Why can’t you make them write programs?″ What appeared at first to me as a defect forced me into automatic programming very early. What appears to be a fault, often, by a change of viewpoint, turns out to be one of the greatest assets you can have. But you are not likely to think that when you first look the thing and say, ``Gee, I’m never going to get enough programmers, so how can I ever do any great programming?″
And there are many other stories of the same kind; Grace Hopper has similar ones. I think that if you look carefully you will see that often the great scientists, by turning the problem around a bit, changed a defect to an asset. For example, many scientists when they found they couldn’t do a problem finally began to study why not. They then turned it around the other way and said, ``But of course, this is what it is″ and got an important result. So ideal working conditions are very strange. The ones you want aren’t always the best ones for you.
In the same talk he also criticizes the Institute for Advanced Study, claiming that they only produced good output because they recruited the very best, but that counterfactually these researchers would have produced better output.
This issue is something I am still somewhat confused about. Feynman makes a similar point about the IAS. I also know about a few more anecdotes in line with the “constraints breed creativity” point.
I think the ‘constraints breed creativity’ applies more to the tools people work with, and other constraints like teaching, administrative tasks, and grant applications mostly waste time.
There might be something to this, but I distinctly recall reading somewhere that having state of the art tools is also crucial for being able to work at the frontier. Without an electron microscope, some research is simply unavailable. (It might also create an incentive to develop an alternative and this is the kind of disruption we’re actually looking for.) More powerful computers also seem like a good thing in general. So I’m not sure how to resolve this.
Edit: Also consider the anecdote mentioned by John Maxwell about PARC of course.
Another thing I remember him once mentioning to me is that PARC bought its researchers very expensive, cutting-edge equipment to do research with, on the assumption that Moore’s Law would eventually drive down the price of such equipment to the point where it was affordable to the mainstream.
On the other hand, in that same talk, Hamming pointed out the importance of abundant computing resources:
One lesson was sufficient to educate my boss as to why I didn’t want to do big jobs that displaced exploratory research and why I was justified in not doing crash jobs which absorb all the research computing facilities. I wanted instead to use the facilities to compute a large number of small problems. Again, in the early days, I was limited in computing capacity and it was clear, in my area, that a “mathematician had no use for machines.” But I needed more machine capacity. Every time I had to tell some scientist in some other area, “No I can’t; I haven’t the machine capacity,” he complained. I said “Go tell your Vice President that Hamming needs more computing capacity.” After a while I could see what was happening up there at the top; many people said to my Vice President, “Your man needs more computing capacity.” I got it!
Note that Richard Hamming disagreed with this. He makes the point that restricted resources force creativity, and the best breakthroughs come through this creativity. I think he has got a point, but I’m not sure what they all-things-considered conclusion should be. I think the ‘constraints breed creativity’ applies more to the tools people work with, and other constraints like teaching, administrative tasks, and grant applications mostly waste time.
Here’s an excerpt form his famous talk on research (for individual researchers, not teams):
In the same talk he also criticizes the Institute for Advanced Study, claiming that they only produced good output because they recruited the very best, but that counterfactually these researchers would have produced better output.
This issue is something I am still somewhat confused about. Feynman makes a similar point about the IAS. I also know about a few more anecdotes in line with the “constraints breed creativity” point.
There might be something to this, but I distinctly recall reading somewhere that having state of the art tools is also crucial for being able to work at the frontier. Without an electron microscope, some research is simply unavailable. (It might also create an incentive to develop an alternative and this is the kind of disruption we’re actually looking for.) More powerful computers also seem like a good thing in general. So I’m not sure how to resolve this.
Edit: Also consider the anecdote mentioned by John Maxwell about PARC of course.
On the other hand, in that same talk, Hamming pointed out the importance of abundant computing resources: