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Elemente ale investiţiilor în cercetare
Alexandru Dan Corlan,
Revista de Politica Ştiinţei şi Scientometrie 1(1):46-66, 2012
ABSTRACT
The dynamics of discovery and innovation are a direct
consequence of a range of decisions to allocate scarce research
resources: time and focus of scientists, functioning time of
existing devices and installations, consumables, funding of various
types, jobs, storage and communication, etc. A prerequisite to
quantitative modelling of the scarce resource allocation process, a
process that here is called “investment”, is the mapping of the
structure of the system in terms of production and use of such
resources. At the heart of this process are the allocation decisions
by each of many decidents. These decisions have an intrinsically
subjective nature, governed by individual and cultural perceptions
of one’s own’s interests and sense of relevance. In this essay we
examine a broad range of investment decision types in view of their
components: initial data for decision, decision options, costs,
expected impact, predictive model that connects data and options to
the impact, relevance to the investor, the interest function that
connects the expected impact to the relevance, risks as well as
decision delegation. The primordial decision, that has to be present
in any research investment, is the decision of a scientist to commit
to a theme for some time. Investment issues are thus a relevant
concern for all scientists. All other types are coinvestments into
the primordial type: collaboration decisions by colleagues, private
grants and donations, creation and allocations of posts by research
institutions, institutional founding and funding instruments,
milestone awards, project funding, comercial investment,
experimental development on demand and strategic acquisitions. For
any coinvestment to occur it must simultaneously reach a relevance
threshold for each of the coinvestors, each having his own sense of
relevance. For successful commercial deployment in particular this
must take place repeatedly with each round of funding with different
coinvestors. An antiportfolio effect acts towards reducing success
rates when investment risks combine in this way. The subjective
component and continuous nature of most investment decisions have to
be stressed. We make a short historical inquiry into the evolution
of each type as well as an assessment of its current situation in
Romania. An estimation of the short term perspectives of each type
is made, particularly in view of changes due to the emergence of new
models of collaboration over the net. This phenomenon together with
the expansion of the knowledge economy and, for the romanian
research system, the adaptation to the ways of the international
research world--to which it is currently reconnecting--amount to
an increasing rate of change in the way research is done. There is
thus a pressing need for further indepth, quantitative analysis of
the constraints and mechanisms of investment types and their
elementary components.
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