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Ask HN: Validate my startup idea, Kickstarter for Academic research

6 points by mcrider ↗ HN
Hi all,

There's a lot of shaking up going on in the area of education, but one thing that hasn't really been modernized is research funding. I think crowdsourcing academic research/distribution might be an interesting way for academics (or even non-academics) to collect funding, rather than applying for grants. This can be used to fund, for example:

-Research that is not easy to get grants/public funding for

-Costs of doing research (paying participants, cost of research instruments, travel costs, etc.)

-Publication and/or internet hosting fees

I'm curious of anyone on HN has arguments for or against this model?

8 comments

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Irene
Researchers are already using kickstarter, kiva and other sites to fund their projects. Why a new site?
mcrider
I think it would be valuable for a number of reasons to have a community of researchers and research-funders rather than a general community of people that need money and people that want to give money away. The main reason being that it would make it more likely for experts to frequent the site and spend money (i.e. researchers could subscribe to a field of interest to get updates on new projects).

Also, I think the incentives would have to be different than current crowdfunding sites -- in some cases I think it would need to be donation based (which e.g. Kickstarter doesn't support).

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Irene
Social networking tools for scientists have not been really successful so far.

There are charities collecting money for research. And there are rich donors giving money to specific groups in academic institutions. Charities would probably appreciate more traffic and exposure but there are google adword grants for non-profits and other channels they can use.

Regarding fundamental, curiosity-driven science - it might be too expensive to be crowdfunded. The use of citizen-science networks might be more realistic.

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biopharma_guy
1. There will be bureaucratic issue for a researcher seeking funding from public. 2. There will be patent issue ( who will own the patent?). 3. Unlike kickstarter where the contributor gets a finished product at the end, what does this project will offer to the public? Name in the publications? or patents?
mcrider
The legal implications would likely be tricky, especially between different countries, but IANAL so I won't comment on that.

I think one would have to be creative as to how to incentivize donations, but there are a number of things an individual could give back to a funder (perhaps a speaking commitment [e.g. a lecture], or something more sentimental like a postcard from the research area). Giving a portion of future patent royalties would be very interesting, but I'm sure there are some major legal considerations there..

Another idea would be to spend other people's money -- E.g. a charitable foundation would drop a sum of cash into the site that users would be able to spend on various research causes. Assuming one could get a charitable organization to be that risky..

polyfractal
What kind of academia are you talking about? You probably won't be able to raise enough money to make a proper life-science research grant.

You would be shocked how fast money goes, even if you are super thrifty with it. As an example, I used one gram of a particular reagent each week. One gram of this compound costs $200. I ran that experiment for almost a year, once per week. That's $10k for a single reagent.

If you factor in all the other costs of the experiment (culture media, weekly rat, tissue culture plates, poly-l-lysine for coating plates, nitrocellulose for blotting, antibodies for westerns (going at $600 for 50uL), assorted reagents, etc etc ad nauseum), the price of my single experiment for a year skyrockets into easily $20k.

That's one technician, working on one part of one tiny paper, working on one insignificant detail of how the human brain works.

Life-sciences is downright, stupidly expensive.

Edit: Sorry, that came across sounding curmudgeonly and bitter. Any lab would be thrilled to receive an extra $20k in funding - it would help pay for a technician to run an experiment.

Just be warned going into it that you will be making a very tiny dent in how things work.