Academia is the game where you gain status by getting attention for new knowledge
Universities have multiple conflicting missions
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Graduate students are the labor in academic science and engineering
People giving out grants try to derisk them as much as possible
Manufacturing is important and often ignored
The word ‘novel’ is used as an idea bludgeon in academia
Peer review doesn’t catch duplications
Bell Labs is one of the few examples of an innovation org that was aligned with its money factory
A new professor needs about $1.5m to get going
Younger professors have to spend more time getting money
Academics are incentivized to do peer-reviewed publishable work
Things that are not paper-worthy enough for academia and not product-focused enough for a startup
Pay-it-forward tithing could resolve the tension between the potential public-good and potential profit in research.
Three myths about scientific peer review
A PI needs to provide evidence that they have access to a lab facility
What was the real incentive for people to work on the DARPA Grand Challenge?
It is easier to have a multipoint mutation in technology than in evolution
NS Notes on Officers Techniques
The boundaries between industry government and academia are fuzzy
Startups and Academia are bad at addressing structural constraints
The Architected Innovation Institute - Engineering Scientific Revolutions
Is it more impactful to find and train undiscovered diamonds or to unlock well-positioned but constrained researchers?
Is it possible that we’re actually getting less research because we have more researchers?
Running list of relevant science news?
Startups need to make a lot of money or have a lot of users
Startups need to conform to investor timescales
Startups are good at point changes
Startup Constraints - essay
Decoupling from market discipline is like cave diving
Current value capture mechanisms are crude
When should an idea that smells like research be a startup?
§Corporate R+D Constraints
Systemic decay theory of stagnation
Ideally corporate R+D enables work on a general purpose technology before it’s specialized
There are many tight feedback loops built into the ARPA model
One function of a private ARPA is to fill in the gap once filled by corporate R+D
There are many important innovations that are just bad investments
The market in for-profit organizations is fairly efficient
Profit-maximizing organizational structures can hamstring technologies whose impact depends on them