Organize Research by Subject

Everyone who cares about bees should work together

By default, reorganizing research around big questions would still largely be organizing research by “function.” That is, the applied engineers would be hanging out with other applied engineers, the mathematicians would be hanging out with mathematicians, and the administrators would be off hanging out with other administrators. There is another way.

In a recent podcast, Kevin Hawickhorst flagged that the functional bureaucracies of the late 19th century combined everything around a particular subject, bees in the department of agriculture, for example. This organizational principle means having people who deploy money towards the subject (giving grants to farmers to improve bee husbandry) in the same place as people doing research adjacent to the subject (how do bee metabolisms work?), next to people who are trying to directly improve implemented things in the subject (what practices enhance bee health?).

One could imagine reorganizing research in a similar way. (We could even say “innovation” because it would be more than just research.) That is, organizations and departments that were focused on a concrete useful thing in the world all the way up and down the ladder of appliedness. An obvious one would be, say, kidney health. You would have everybody from people funding dialysis to people studying the metabolic pathways for processing urea to doctors who work with patients.

This would in some ways enable more specialization. People could do more incomplete research instead of needing to tell a complete story with every publication, as long as it fed into the bigger picture. A small version of this is a practice Ben heard of once where a lab group that worked on medical device research paid an MD to come and sit in on their lab meetings.