How should research funding be assessed? What makes good spending on research? Should it be about patents filed? Or about the number of significant breakthroughs per dollar spent? How about revenues generated from licensing a technology? Or royalties on the patent? Is that really the best way?
What if a drug that could save many lives was discovered? But then it would take much more investment to get the drug tested and so on? What if the research funding itself wasn’t able to get innovation through to the stage where commercialisation would be successful?
The original question was really hard. And one of the things that my research into intellectual property rights regime revealed is that it never was about the patents system or the risk capital that drove innovations. Often, it’s merely the ability to disclose and disseminate information, especially knowledge that would otherwise have been kept a secret, that would have helped push an overall system towards being more innovative.
After all, the Industrial Revolution happened in Britain during a period when their intellectual property rights were terrible, and a patent was mainly used as a form of marketing rather than a way to achieve a monopoly.
So when National Research Foundation or even our A*STAR tries to properly steward taxpayers money by trying to figure out how to spend research funding wisely, they might want to take note that true innovation is the goal of the spending, and not so much the commercialisation value. The need to enforce some kind of ‘commercialisation’ target could very well destroy the very foundation and philosophical underpinnings of research and discovery. The reason government funding is needed is precisely because the market is unable to offer that same kind of funding directed to those activity – so to demand ‘market discipline’ from those activities will bring us back to square one. The underprovision of innovation and hence market failure. Only this time, it is the government who fails.
