Research Funding is Critical to Societally Relevant Research

Abstract

There has been increasing concern recently in ensuring that public funding for science and innovation creates truly public benefits. This has emerged at a time of an uneasy feeling emerging in society that it is private corporations and patent holders that reap the rewards, particularly in new drugs which may be generally unaffordable despite being ‘discovered’ by public funding (Gronde et al., 2017). Barry Bozeman’s work about public value failure highlights the sense that ‘the public voice’ has been suppressed in scientific decision-making primarily oriented towards delivering technological advances (Bozeman, 2002). Indeed, contemporary world’s complexity makes it hard for researchers working on narrow technologically focused questions can comprehend how their results will be used once their ideas have left the laboratory. This raises the question of whether funding can function as a governance instrument to encourage this wider reflective practice, to ensure that scientists take all reasonable measures to use their privileged positions to benefit society?