Best-case outcome if neither applies: your idea has commercial potential and you can get a startup out of it. Which means the vast majority of ideas, both STEM and humanities, are out. Even I’m not optimist enough to think your R&D on 16rh century French poets can be a unicorn.
Conversation
The reason software doesn’t eat R&D even though people think it should is that tools or open access to published lit/libraries, or free peer-reviewed publishing/presentation forums (if you want that) are only a tiny fraction of the cost for most ideas. The main host is time.
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Even if the most expensive research tools like LHC or Hubble got as cheap as Arduinos, it wouldn’t help. That’s not the cost bottleneck. The bottleneck is researcher time. Even crappiest, cheapest conference paper I ever wrote took at least 6 months (~7k grad student salary then)
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This isn’t cheap talk btw. I dropped 2k on a personal Matlab license after I went indie and kept it current for years, and went through dozens of false starts working on various ideas. Couldn’t find the time to develop any of them to even bad-conference-paper level.
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Note: peer-reviewed publishing or patents just as depth cal9bration. I wouldn’t necessarily publish in such forms since I don’t think those institutional processes have ever added much to my work. Nor into them tbf, in the peer reviewing I’ve done. But I’d aim for that depth.
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Note #2: I enjoy proper research, but wasn’t a great talent even at my peak and am now likely at 60%. So in a way this is an okay market outcome. If I were wealthy I might do self-indulgent mediocre research for the rest of my life, but no reason you should pay for it.
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Replying to
One answer is smaller institutions like or Mozilla Foundation that offer time limited research fellowships rather than tenure
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We can do slightly different things, more like what a digital agency might do. Agility is a benefit. See electiontechhandbook.uk for a recent output.
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For a small fraction of addressable problems
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A lot of the value in these kinds of institutions is the common room, the peer group. That is much harder to maintain and especially to build online
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Not for me. I got very little out of peers. It was pure;y about paid-for time for me.
It's also about creating a context for the kind of work. Talking to my sons about their university experience, I was fascinated that the library was valued as a context - they didn't need the books very often, but a dedicated space for reading, thinking and writing mattered.
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My experience as a librarian says it’s not that researchers ever need lots of books, but that they need a few very specific things that only a large library would have 😏
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