Research project with Greg Volynsky to increase the diffusion of academic research into public policy. This project was supervised by Professor George Loewenstein. Read the report here!
The academic world has long treasured her independence — academia is seen as an intellectual silo; an oasis of thought and science. This is, in many ways, a necessary, positive, and formative feature of the academic world — transformational thought requires autonomy and distance. Intellectual developments have, therefore, historically had a substantial incubation period; this, too, can be perceived as a net positive — it makes the realm of acceptable science shift more slowly, decreases the frequency of scientific back-peddling, and maintains the long-term authority of academic research.
Often, however, the pace of scientific input in application is exceedingly slow. This is perhaps most obviously true in American politics — there are areas of scientific thought with universal academic consensus, which are yet to be reflected in political conversation. In our national politics, this is, of course, not an information problem — it is, widely, a testament to the power of concentrated over dispersed interests. Yet it seems plausible that facilitating partnerships between academics and public policy-makers on the state and local level, or between academics and business leaders, would make the public and private sectors more responsive to scientific research; this change would amplify academic thought in the pursuit of social progress. In this research project, we sought to uncover insights for how best to expand the reach of university research, in the realms of business and government.
We began by evaluating the concept of a non-profit with the aim of building relationships between academic researchers and public policy-makers. We had conversations with around seventy-five stakeholders — policy-makers, legislators, professors — and came to the conclusions which follow. The stakeholders universally identified a deficiency in academic-government relationships; however, we determined that the pain is not concentrated on any particular stakeholder, so the desire for greater partnership is unfortunately weak. In other words, most stakeholders believe that greater collaboration between academic researchers and public policy-makers would have significant social benefit — but they do not believe that a lack of such relationships is seriously harming their personal interests. Based on this reality, we can not make a significant impact on academic-government partnerships, and instead, shifted our focus to academic-corporate partnerships.
Throughout the research process, we organized a pilot program to identify characteristics of successful academic-government relationships. Specifically, our pilot program sought to connect eight local/state government offices with Carnegie Mellon researchers. From the pilot, we determined that there is greater potential for academic-legislative partnerships that are built around nonpartisan and bipartisan issues. Our pilot program with PA State Representative Rabb is still ongoing.
Our evaluation of the concept of an organization which would build partnerships between academic researchers and companies yielded more promising results. In particular, we received promising feedback from conversations with business executives at Deloitte; they told us that Deloitte might use a service that allows the company to contract out research to graduate students, if the platform were fully operational. They also recommended that we choose mid-market consumer products/services and consumer sales companies as our beachhead market; this is a excellent avenue for future research.
Our conversations with professors, graduate students, and companies also elicited three key concerns with advancing academic-corporate partnerships. First, these relationships take time and effort build, but they can come crumbling down when company direction shifts even slightly. Second, there exists a schism between academic & company cultures/aims, which which often makes cooperation difficult. Finally, graduate students and professors with niche, theoretical interests are unlikely to find research which piques their interest and is also of high demand in the private sector.
This report details the process by which we reached the conclusions described, and lays the groundwork for budding future organizations. We live in a world of ever-increasing sophistication, and experts with ever-narrower specialties. This is a time which requires more connection then ever between experts and the real world, and we hope this report contributes towards the development of these partnerships.