Is Research a Sport, a Market or a Commons?

As the old adage goes, "Research is turning money into ideas, but innovation is turning ideas into money". Money is limited, so research funding is competitive. But - beyond pathological cases of individual misconduct - what behaviours does this competition in research produce for research institutions? And where will they lead?

We all know the statistics - a 9.6% success rate for Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowships, BBSRC introducing caps for in-flight grants to avoid a 2.5% success rate, a 70% drop in new STFC funding value. At institutional level, Manchester received over 300 applications for a recent fellowship call with less than 10 positions available and over 70 expressions of interest for less than five science and engineering places in the next Future Leaders Fellowship round.

At the same time, the University of Nottingham has issued an all-staff redundancy notice and the University of Sheffield is cutting staff; both are members of the prestigious Russell Group of research-intensive universities.

Financial miscalculation, geopolitics, and regulatory constraints play a dominant role in these cases. However in research, intense competition and financial pain are related through academic posts available - and without money, there is no path to create ideas.

Who We Think We Are

Academic researchers have a strong founding myth, built over the past 400 years. We espouse collegiality, open and collaborative science through publication, peer review as a gift and knowledge as a commons; these were captured by Merton in 1942 in his CUDO norms. Fundamentally we compete with ideas, not with people.

However, Schein speaks of three levels of culture; and the tangible artefacts of research show something different. Grant applications, REF submissions, league tables and institutional rankings. These are unambiguously competitive instruments between people and organisations that breach Merton's disinterest test.

At the deepest level, academic researchers internalise that scarcity is natural, excellence will be rewarded. These basic assumptions lead to universities in the UK looking to Nottingham or Sheffield and finding that 'there but for the grace of God go I'.

I've discussed the psychological cost at the individual level arising from the gap between artefacts and values. But at the institutional level these lead to an environment that reflects deep cognitive dissonances: that the system is meritocratic yet that it can be fairly "gamed", that we are shocked by market failure but deeply engaged in competition, that we work for the common good yet are keenly aware of historic and systemic biases.

The Rules of the Game

Is modern science a sport, a business, or a commons? What are the shared rules that determine how we should behave as a community?

• Sport is honour bound - competition within rules that you do not exploit. Merton norms apply, and there is no benefit to be found by removing competitors from the market.
• Business is law bound - you should exploit every legal advantage. This can include poaching top staff from a distressed competitor and seeking to dominate the market.
• Commons is norms bound - Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom describes shared resources that are sustainably managed, but only when the community has a mechanism to enforce norms and boundaries, and mechanisms for sanction.

In reality, science has always been a hybrid of these. Grant peer review and citations are a sport, where we recognise the strengths and weaknesses of other players. Facilities, estates and hiring patterns follow business logic, with investments to establish unique capabilities. Publication are dominated by commons logic, where the fruits of science are freely disseminated.

But this conventional balance is changing, and an incoherence is becoming more obvious. The drive to commercialise research is pushing open publication into protected IP. Sector-wide, organisations are looking at mergers and acquisitions in a way that is far closer to commercial behaviours. And the requirement for boundary clarity for a stable commons is being broken, as it becomes increasingly unclear who is 'in' the commons of science with startups, neolabs and industry labs competing.

The recent Cranfield-Kings College London "merger" is a case in point. Despite Cranfield being the smaller party in a financially perilous state, nobody has called this a hostile takeover, or a play for market share, or about stranded assets. Yet in business terms, this is structurally true: a consolidation in a market with over-capacity. This is not a criticism of the decision, which may produce a stronger successor. But naming this merger as what it really is - a billion pound revenue organisation growing market share through a strategic acquisition - is the first step to considering what it means.

This framing makes it easy to step to the fundamental question: what is the right size for the research market? And how far are we from this?

The Szilard Point

Recently, Gerald Schweiger claimed that the cost of applying for grants exceeded the value of grant funding returned. This is the so called Szilard point, named for the satirical story by Leo Szilard, where the pace of science was intentionally slowed by a highly bureaucratic grant process with small reward. Examples abound, including GenAI for Africa call (215 submissions for €5M, with estimated €5M - €40M writing costs); this is effectively a lottery with a catastrophic effort overhead.

More recently, Pollitt found that application costs in the UK are 13% of grant value, with almost 90% of these falling on the applicant themselves; this can be more than consumables and travel costs (given ~50% of the bid goes as institutional overheads).

The deeper story is one of a lack of opportunity cost accounting which is rife across academia. At 10% success rate, for every funded grant nine proposals-worth of researcher's time and effort produces nothing. In a commercial research environment, this might appear on a risk register, but at a university it is considered normal. As we move further towards low success rate lotteries, well-run universities might start to ask when the point arises to prevent academics from writing net-cost grant proposals. Because dead-weight loss on your key human capital is not an acceptable friction, it is a drag on the whole sector.

Fundamentally, the reason that we've passed the Szilard point is because there are more institutions, each with more researchers, all well-trained to write grants, who are chasing funding that has not grown commensurately. The writing overhead is a symptom of this, but the configuration of the marketplace is the disease.

International Parallels

This effect is not unique to the UK, and other systems are facing the same pressures. While the UK has remained on a track towards formally levelling access to funding, other systems have imposed elements of stratification: the Exzellenzinitiative in Germany is an explicit and transparent concentration of funds, unlike the de facto tiering of the Group of Eight (Australia) or Russell Group (UK). These approaches seek to maximise the international competitiveness of a nations research by artificially restricting the internal size of the market to an oligopoly.

On the other hand, the US uses both implicit market mechanisms and significant philanthropic capital, such as Moore Foundation and Schmidt Foundation to provide a buffer that the UK simply does not have. A market-based approach requires sustained competitive advantage to be sought in niches and unique capabilities, but can lead to a winner-takes-most market.

The UK appears to be doing neither - we do not explicitly stratify research, nor use a pure market mechanism to drive sectoral innovation, nor do we have the scale of philanthropic capital to fill in the gaps in purpose-driven research.

The Right Size

Today, the UK research footprint has outgrown the realistic funding envelope available to sustain it. Continuing with the pretence of a sport-like competition or commons-like collaboration will only ensure that these institutional crises are repeated in slow motion across the sector.

Recent history in the UK has shown that public-good organisations that do not recognise their place in a market have this recognition forced upon them, often through the mechanism of individual institutional crisis. The newspaper industry in the first part of the 21st century had many parallels: too many outlets, fixed revenue, and a founding myth of journalistic independence. Each individual institutional failure was treated as an idiosyncratic series of management mistakes, not honestly as structural inevitability. In 2008 the sector was aware of the structural problems, but still did not act collectively until forced. Are universities the next newspapers?

To be clear, the research debate is different from the wider institutional funding crisis related to teaching and geopolitics. However, these are intertwined at the cultural level; competition and culture are critical for both.

As much as today's successful universities might claim their robust financial situation is purely down to superior choices, this is only half the story - and strategically dangerous. In reality, proximity to a successful city economy, long history, and structural luck make the difference.

What Leaders Can do

Research leaders in universities need to carefully name the game that we're in. This does not mean cynicism, but also a clear-eyed recognition that the playing field is not a pure commons. With this framing, universities can compete on their genuine strengths; not on all fronts. Universal capability might look successful for endowment backed Oxbridge, but in reality the focus of Aston, Strathclyde and Southampton are a true sustainable strength. Southampton's 30-year commitment to photonics infrastructure, as a investment hypothesis and a hiring pattern (not just a strategy document) created something that cannot be copied.

The sector should be more open about academic mobility. We cannot pretend that an academic job market does not exist - and movement towards sectoral strength (or even financial strength) is not opportunism, it is a system that works.

The funding ecosystem is diversifying. And while the need to make grant funding work is necessary, the larger question is how to make institutions more honest about the culture of competition they sit within. Naming the game is essential, but not sufficient; the structural questions require action from those with structural power.

If the sector really is too large for the resource available, and it cannot self-stratify or sufficiently diversify through voluntary action, then what is the mechanism by which a right size is ultimately reached? The worrying conclusion is that current crises (Nottingham, Sheffield) or market action (Cranfield-King's) will be repeated, without planning or control. It is time to stop playing an idealised sport we can no longer afford, and start managing the realities of the market we actually inhabit.