By Doug Noonan
I’ve had a summer of research convenings – full of great people, great ideas, and some research-driven insights. One striking feature of these meetings has been their varied contexts and participants. Some meetings are for and of practitioners, others are full of research consultants, and others teeming with academic researchers. All of the meetings had a mix of these 3 types.
The mix amplifies our differences. Mixing consultants, academics, and practitioners shows just how much it matters “where we’re coming from.” Incentives matter. Few are privileged enough to have freedom to ignore their own incentives. Most were driven and constrained by their incentives. It colors everything.
Practitioners, academics, and consultants had different interests, possessed different datasets, and pursued different questions. Alignment does happen. It’s uncommon, and it usually doesn’t happen by chance.
Research can be seen along a continuum from basic to applied. Basic research is curiosity-driven, looking for answers not necessarily worrying about immediate practical application. Applied research aims to problem-solve with specific answers to questions asked by folks in the field. Typically, the closer one gets to the private sector and businesses facing direct competitive pressures, the more applied the research. Move toward universities and national labs, you’ll find more basic research. That’s because of the incentives.
Sometimes, there’s a tension in research between basic and applied. Often, we criticize basic research as being “academic” (in the sense of “pointless”), and often that’s a fair point! But good basic research provides novel and essential insights – generalizable knowledge that might enable future applied solutions. Applied work, by contrast, is not usually generalizable (i.e., it’s applied to particular problems) by intent or design. I know of consultancies filling libraries with hard-won insights of great value to their clients, but the libraries are closed and not intended (or able) to provide lessons to others.
Note the paradoxes. The super-useful applied research tends to have the most limited usefulness, because it’s so client-driven that it only works for that client. The basic work asking bigger or deeper questions can foster the transformation that either nobody asks for or will pay for.
Recent controversies about shuttering national research capabilities and university funding strikes directly at the basic side of this continuum. Applied research might even benefit from gutting basic research, so rejoice ye who discount basic research! I’m old-fashioned, however, and celebrate curiosity, believe basic research underpins genuine and widespread innovation, have tempered expectations about the prospects for applied research to overcome incentives against widespread benefits and transformative potential.
I say this not out of implicit self-interest. I enjoy sufficient privilege (don’t tell my state legislators!) to have freedom to undertake basic or applied research. Every day, I do both. Instead, I merely want to remind us that basic and research complement one another; both are better when the other is strong. If we neglect or de-fund basic research, we lose so much potential. If you value curiosity-driven work, research for the community rather than particular organizations or clients, and the prospect of new insights having their greatest value in solving problems we don’t anticipate … then save a spot for basic research.
Data and ideas want to be public. Copyright, patents, and (the damnable) two-factor authentication are daily reminders for some of us about how hard we have to work to keep data and ideas private. They want to escape, float out into the ether, and inform/empower others. Of course, that does not mean that they always should … nor does it mean we should ignore the importance of incentives for creating the data and ideas in the first place. Exactly the opposite! Incentives matter here. We founded Arts Analytics because we could, our incentives didn’t hold us back, and others supported getting data and ideas “out there.” Join us to supporting more data and ideas for the greater good!