EuroScientist: Self-organised scientific crowds to remedy research bureaucracy
EuroScientist published an article discussing how to remedy research bureaucracy. In the article, the opinions and writings of Prof. Dirk Helbing in the FuturICT blog are cited, to show how bureaucracy might be hindering innovation and how to tackle this problem.
external pageThe article was published in EuroScientist, the official journal of the non-profit grassroots association of researchers in Europe "EuroScience", on 9 November, 2016.
The related FuturICT blog post "Why our innovation system is failing - and how to change this" can be found through this external pagelink.
" “After teaching and paperwork, science is happening in the evenings and weekends, like a hobby,” says Dirk Helbing, professor of computational social science at ETH Zürich, Switzerland, who has been an advocate for “re-inventing innovation.”
However, there is much more at stake than scientists’ spare time. “There hasn’t been any great innovations since Darwin’s theory of evolution and Einstein’s theory of relativity,” writes Helbing in his Future ICT blog. He adds: “Science is increasingly run like a business, measured by performance indicators.” He also points out: While we perform better and better according to these indicators […] the problems our society is facing haven’t been fixed," wrote EuroScientist.
"Helbing calls for an even more radical change in the philosophy of funding. “Since great ideas cannot be identified beforehand, we should shift from funding proposals to refunding great ideas,” he proposes. Scientists would get a starting capital without the need for filing proposal and after some time the funds would be increased or decreased depending on their success, without the need for writing reports. Helbing admits, however, that identifying great ideas would be still an open problem," added EuroScientist.