With this holiday in America being a time for giving thanks after the harvest and for the establishment of a constitutional government devoted to safety and happiness, making it a truly economic celebration built on a recognition of the good that may come from social collaboration in tune with the great seasons of our environment, it’s good to say thank-you to all the research investigators for their work to discover and invent, to develop and evaluate, to explore, examine, record, fiddle, futz, noodle, dig, and chew their way through the stuff of this world to get at the new, the true, and the tested.
And thank-you, too, to all the folks who collaborate in this environment to help to get work out, to create projects and develop intellectual property, and form businesses and relationships with businesses, and advocate and evangelize, and challenge and question, and coordinate, and even those who say, no, not now, not that way.
The work of connecting research with community is on-going, important. It does not benefit by becoming routine, bland, a matter for an uneventful orderliness. It benefits by being refreshed and reinspired, for finding new points of connection and leaving behind those that have served and had their day. Where yesterday it may have been venture capital tomorrow it may be community foundations or church groups or high schools or family owned farms.
Important things are in front of us. Of course, there is a fight for the soul of research invention ownership, pitting the patent administrators who love power against folks who value personal freedom. There is also the huge problem of university funding, especially as we see the self-destruction of public universities, reaching to supplement their shortfalls in research indirect cost recoveries with much higher tuition for students, driving them deeper into debt and converting a social idea of the community value of an educated population into a purchased personal credential, buyer beware. How this transformation will affect research innovation remains to be seen. There is also a deepening crisis in scientific integrity, as scientists experiment in social activism and advise their colleagues that it is more important to be effective in shaping a political message than to be altogether honest or true in reporting findings. Along with withholding data and tools, selective reporting, and manipulating models to pre-determined social or political outcomes, this change in the scientific community also promises to affect the activities of technology transfer, intellectual property, and research communication.
The business of innovation with research is far from settled. The approaches that “have worked” must be reassessed as conditions change, and approaches that “didn’t work” before may now be much more suited to application. And especially, stuff we have not even thought of yet is still there to be uncovered and developed and deployed to advantage. To live in 1912 and see the formation of the Research Corporation as a collaboration of faculty and industry and private foundations to drive forward research and engage the commercial interests of the company and reward inventors! Heady days. Same for the formation of the National Science Foundation in 1950, and the passage of Bayh-Dole in 1980. We are now 30 years running on the present path. It’s about time for the clock to tick, for innovation practice to get a big boost. Where will that come from? Who will step up with the next move to re-inspire our efforts to cure, solve, obsolesce, and recreate?
Today, we eat, talk, perhaps watch a football game or the weather or the relatives. Then, back at. Thanks, finally, to everyone who visits this site. We may not always agree, but I wish you well on your journey, because in the end it is what we do each day that matters.