Whence Systems Research? - by Ben Reinhardt

I’ve struggled to articulate the flavor of research that PARPA does, and why it’s different from the profusion of research that we do see happening. I’ve hand-waved a bit at things that are “too researchy to be a startup and too engineering-heavy to be in academia” but this is not quite right — if things go to plan, some of the work we do will be collaborations with both startups and academia. Instead, the right phrase for what we’re doing is “systems research.” It’s one of those terms that was once so common that people didn’t need to define it, but has fallen so far out of use that it no longer means anything to most people. I want to unpack what systems research is and how it differs from other research, why it’s important, how current institutions fall short on the systems research front, and some hunches around how PARPA plans to enable more of it. The use of the term systems research roughly reflects how much of it gets done Any attempt to rigorously define either “systems” or “r

I’ve struggled to articulate the flavor of research that PARPA does, and why it’s different from the profusion of research that we do see happening. I’ve hand-waved a bit at things that are “too researchy to be a startup and too engineering-heavy to be in academia” but this is not quite right — if things go to plan, some of the work we do will be collaborations with both startups and academia. Instead, the right phrase for what we’re doing is “systems research.” It’s one of those terms that was once so common that people didn’t need to define it, but has fallen so far out of use that it no lon