That's a big can of worms. This dual employment may have its drawbacks (I think mostly due to the fact that this is a mega-corp; for a small bootstrapped company it's only good, I think), but consider the following two topics:
* People would work in academic institution XOR your company: you cannot give the grant to the best in your field and still have him work for you, so you'd always want to hire the best you can, and give the grants to the rest;
* Grants most often support publications, not working solutions. At least with government-sponsored grants it's best when the academic analysis and publication is sponsored from a grant, whereas industrial involvement guarantees that the work is relevant and the published solution actually works.
I think the moment a 'grant' has concrete deliverables (to a private firm?) it ceases being a grant and starts being some kind of consulting. I think people try to do this around ucla pretty often i.e. (I give a professor money -they do the research- I keep the IP)- it is pretty frowned upon in that context. In ML and CS I think this is probably more kosher-Michael Kearns seems to have a pretty thriving consultancy.
DARPA structures a lot of its research funding like this. The 'award' is a contract, typically for data, models, etc. For example, the statement of work for my last project has about a dozen deliverables of the form "tabulated data comparing [outcome] against [experimental variable 1], [exp. variable 2], ...." or "a computational model relating...." As far as I can tell, they are not actually interested in the data itself; this is just a hack to use the procurement process to fund research. They were happy to let the researchers keep and share the data.
In theory, the contract structure seems a lot more limited than an NIH, NSF, etc. grant, where you are minimally constrained by the proposal, but in practice, the program managers seem willing to amend the contract so that no one collects a bunch of obviously useless data.
My university, in contrast, is pushing industry engagement like this pretty hard. I happen to disagree with that approach, but it is a thing.
There is sort of a continuum between consulting and a research contract, admittedly, but I'll also note that I have government grants with deliverables. All it really means is that there's potentially interim products that need to be delivered, or that there's things that are less vague than papers and presentations that the agency/sponsor wants to see.
Comments
That's a big can of worms. This dual employment may have its drawbacks (I think mostly due to the fact that this is a mega-corp; for a small bootstrapped company it's only good, I think), but consider the following two topics:
* People would work in academic institution XOR your company: you cannot give the grant to the best in your field and still have him work for you, so you'd always want to hire the best you can, and give the grants to the rest;
* Grants most often support publications, not working solutions. At least with government-sponsored grants it's best when the academic analysis and publication is sponsored from a grant, whereas industrial involvement guarantees that the work is relevant and the published solution actually works.
It's trivial to structure grants (or indeed contracts) such that they have concrete deliverables, even for academic research.
I think the moment a 'grant' has concrete deliverables (to a private firm?) it ceases being a grant and starts being some kind of consulting. I think people try to do this around ucla pretty often i.e. (I give a professor money -they do the research- I keep the IP)- it is pretty frowned upon in that context. In ML and CS I think this is probably more kosher-Michael Kearns seems to have a pretty thriving consultancy.
DARPA structures a lot of its research funding like this. The 'award' is a contract, typically for data, models, etc. For example, the statement of work for my last project has about a dozen deliverables of the form "tabulated data comparing [outcome] against [experimental variable 1], [exp. variable 2], ...." or "a computational model relating...." As far as I can tell, they are not actually interested in the data itself; this is just a hack to use the procurement process to fund research. They were happy to let the researchers keep and share the data.
In theory, the contract structure seems a lot more limited than an NIH, NSF, etc. grant, where you are minimally constrained by the proposal, but in practice, the program managers seem willing to amend the contract so that no one collects a bunch of obviously useless data.
mmmm today i learned something new-thanks.
My university, in contrast, is pushing industry engagement like this pretty hard. I happen to disagree with that approach, but it is a thing.
There is sort of a continuum between consulting and a research contract, admittedly, but I'll also note that I have government grants with deliverables. All it really means is that there's potentially interim products that need to be delivered, or that there's things that are less vague than papers and presentations that the agency/sponsor wants to see.