While building PARPA, I’ve run into many pervasive beliefs about intrinsic motivation in research, research management, and the role of funding organizations in both. While I’m hesitant to say that they’re wrong, I do think there’s a lot of room to upgrade how we think about those things.

Let’s start with two pieces of accepted wisdom about research that often find themselves in tension. (If you buy both conclusions, feel free to skip this part!)

#1: Great Research requires intrinsic motivation

There are three core reasons why great research requires massive motivation:

First, great research hinges on people thinking about problems all the time: from Archimedes realizing that buoyancy came from displacing fluids in the bath to Kary Mullis’ famous night drive where the idea of PCR came to him.. These discoveries require questions to be constantly percolating in the back of your mind. 9 to 5 just doesn’t cut it.

Second, great research often requires risks to reputation, careers, or physical wellbeing. Newton stuck a rod into his own eye to experiment with how lens deformation affected vision. Edwin Land had to break and enter as part of creating the polaroid process: climbing through a window via a 6th-floor ledge in order to use a Columbia lab’s powerful magnet.

Third, researchers on the knowledge frontier are often ridiculed, scorned, or persecuted: both from within their communities or outside of them.^[1]

The timescale of glory, even for successful research, is often tens of years, if not lifetimes. Add that to the fact that the goal of great research is rarely to become rich and it’s clear that a good chunk of that massive motivation needs to be intrinsic.

The importance of intrinsic motivation has created a common perception (both among researchers and non-researchers) that the ideal state for doing research is, as Vannevar Bush bush put it in “Science, The Endless Frontier”:

Free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice, in the manner dictated by their curiosity for exploration of the unknown.

But at the same time …

#2: Research management matters

Most researchers bristle at the idea of being managed. But management happens all the time in research, from academic labs to CERN. Nobody likes the idea of being managed, but many triumphs of research, especially in the 20th century, depended on good management.

At some point, unle...

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