The Western world’s ongoing financial woes are providing food for thought for all of us on the pros, cons, opportunities and dangers of a market-based economy. In the face of financial austerity that’s biting into education and research grant budgets, universities and research institutes are under increasing pressure to look for alternative sources of income from education and research, through charging fees for education, focusing on “impact” science with real-world applications, and generating funds from that research through spin-offs and intellectual property.
One of the first people I met at SciFoo was Elizabeth Iorns, a cancer researcher at the University of Miami, who had recently relocated to the land of science milk and tech honey, Palo Alto, to launch a start-up company that aims to help labs maximise the return from their experimental equipment, and help others gain access to equipment they don’t have available in their own labs. The website for Science Exchange launched a couple of weeks ago and got some nice coverage from Nature. On the site, scientists can advertise their projects, and others can bid on them to do the work, leading to the nickname “an eBay for science”.
There’s some aspects to the system that aren’t all that clear to me, but it’s certainly a great idea and I look forward to hearing how it goes.
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