Bottling Lightning - by Ben Reinhardt - ARPA Riffing

The interplay between funding organizations, research management, and research motivation

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…

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