For context, start here with Part 1 of Ben Reinhardt’s monograph on Unbundling the University. See more of Ben’s work at Speculative Technologies.

1. Changes to the research ecosystem are bottlenecked by where the work is done

Our ability to generate and deploy new technologies is critical for the future. Why new technology matters depends on who you are: economists want to see total factor productivity increase, politicians want a powerful economy and military, nerds want more awesome sci-fi stuff, researchers want to be able to do their jobs, and everybody wants their children’s material life to improve.

Uncountable gallons of ink and man-hours of actual work have been poured into improving this system — from how papers are published and how grants are made to creating entirely new centers and accelerators. But most of these efforts to improve the system go to waste.

It is almost impossible to change a system when the people who are doing the actual work — the inventing and discovering — are still heavily embedded in the institutions that created the need for systemic improvement in the first place. To unpack that:

1. Universities (and academia more broadly) are taking over more and more work that doesn’t have immediate commercial applications. In other words, academia has developed a monopoly on pre- and non-commercial research.

2. The friction and constraints associated with university research have increased over time.

3. Combined, points #1 and #2 mean that you won’t be able to drastically improve how our research ecosystem works without drastically changing the university or building ways to fully route around it.

There are many reasons for doing research at universities. Universities have a lot of (often underused) equipment that is rare or expensive – there are a shockingly large number of pieces of equipment or tacit knowledge that only exist in one or two places in the world. Universities have graduate students and postdocs, who provide cheap labor in exchange for training. Perhaps most importantly, universities are where the people with experience doing research are: spinning up a new research location from scratch is slow and expensive; hiring people full-time locks you into research projects or directions.

Both for these concrete reasons and because it’s the cultural default, most efforts to enable pre-commercial research involve funding a university lab, building a university building, or starting a new university-affiliated center or institute. But doing so severely constrains speed,