In a post earlier in the year I talked about the independent scientist and how very experienced people were stepping out of their careers with sufficient income to engage in science as independents, assuming that they could find ways to reproduce the networks and tools that they needed. In a somewhat plaintive cry from a commenter, I was asked how that might work if you didn’t have a made-up pension or other income following a well paid career but wanted to continue working in research. Roughly translated, I think that means “this may work for you old gits, but what about us that still have our hair and eyesight”. Having confidently said I would reply soon, it has taken me 5 months to think of an answer. Hubris.
Because I am not sure you can. At least, I can see ways to make an independent living as a young scientist, but it may not be end up being research and it may mean that you do a lot of things that you don’t want to do. It depends a lot on what your research area is, what motivates you and how committed you are. So how could you do this?
First of all, independence and the ability to decide what you do and how you do it is a very desirable thing, but it doesn’t come easy. The nearest you got to independence in research used to be an academic environment in the days when there wasn’t so much time pressure on academics to both teach and bring in money from grants and consultancy work. By independence, I think we are probably talking about self-employment, bringing in your own funding and managing your own costs. The downside of this life is that you have to be constantly alert to where your income is coming from. It means you need to be always thinking about 3 things. The first is visibility. This means how much time have you got (before the money runs out). It is derived from the most conservative estimate you can make of projected income minus your running costs. If your visibility is less than a year there should be an amber light flashing. Anything less than 6 months and it’s a red. Anything less than 3 months and its time to ring up the folks and see if your old bedroom is still available. All the time you will need to be working on reducing your costs and working very hard on the second thing you need to be constantly thinking about, which is what options do I have? You need options. Most opportunities (i.e. things that generate income) that you will work on won’t come off, so you have to work on lots of options. All the time. particularly when you relax and think that you have got a deal or a grant. They often fall through at the last minute. The third thing is validation. What is it you are doing and how much evidence do you have that it will work? Or is useful? Everything you do as an independent, i.e. without a permanent job, has to be about maximising these three things. Visibility, Options and Validation.
None of this is of much use though until you have sat down and thought really hard about your research and what you want to do, from two perspectives, the benefits of the research, and the costs of doing it. Working out the benefits of your research is surprisingly difficult. The internal benefits, that is benefits to you personally are easy and they centre around the science and technology that interests you. The hardest thing in all of this is visualising and expressing the external benefits, i.e. benefits to the “customer” or the organisation that may be prepared to pay you an income. I still find this the hardest bit. Fundamentally, like most scientists, I get excited by new ideas, new technologies and “how thing’s might be”. Backing off from all that enthusiasm and reframing things in terms of benefits to others is actually very tough. What you are doing in thinking through benefits is to work out who you potential customers are. As an aside, if you don’t like the idea of “customers” or the word, you might want to take a step back from this whole thing. If you don’t have your own income, you need to find other people who will provide it. Customers don’t buy technology or science, they buy solutions to their problems. So you need to think carefully about the benefits of your research to a potential customer, and frame your funding proposals in terms of what they think their problems are, not what you think they should be.
As an example of this let me take a trivial example. let’s suppose you’ve come up with some algorithm that solves the NP-complete problem. First of all, congratulations. You get the Über-Propeller Head Prize of the decade. Now its understandable why you’d want to market yourself as the person who solved the NP-complete problem, because its one in the eye for all your fellow Propeller Heads. However, don’t do this. Firstly there are very few people who understand what you are talking about (your market is small) and they don’t sign cheques (your market is very small). You will get a lot of interest, open doors and give lots of presentations, but the people listening so carefully aren’t really going to pay for anything. They are trying to do two things. Firstly they want to prove you wrong. Second, they want to find out how you did it so they can do it themselves. What you really need to do is go to the Avon Ladies and explain that you will reduce their costs of sales by 20% and that will increase their profitability by £x/year. See how hard that is? If I’d solved the NP-complete problem I’d want to shout about it too, not reduce my triumph to such a trivial level. You may not like this but remember the Golden Rule
The Golden Rule. Them what’s got the gold, makes the rules
…, and if you want to get paid you will need to follow the customer’s rules. Alongside thinking about the benefits of what you do, who might value that, and who are your customers might be, you need to think about your costs. If its a lab based activity, then you have kit, space and consumables to deal with. You can do it. I know a chemistry company that started with the founder assembling chemicals for sale in his garage. Is there someone who will loan you space and access to kit in return for something you can offer them? Maybe you can do a deal to work part time for them helping them solve their problems while having a some time left to do your own thing. Maybe you can come to an agreement to use their facilities for some future return on investment. Maybe you can get some kit from a fire sale and start off in your garage? Have you thought of moving to a country where the cost of living is lower and the authorities might be interested in getting in people with your skills? Maybe they would give you some kind of incentive? There may be grants that can help. Obviously this depends very much on where you wish to be based, but in the UK, the Government Grants for Research and Development (micro, research and development levels) are an option. One possibility is via the EU Framework grants which unlike the EPSRC and BBSRC, are not exclusive to academic institutes. You can bid for them as Joe Bloggs Ltd. If you put a consortium grant proposal together with yourself as project leader you can put all your personal costs against the grant. Like all grants you will be subject to the vagaries of the assessment and competence of the referees, but as I said you will need to run multiple options. By the way, these grant giving bodies are still customers. You still have to think carefully about what benefits they are looking for and why what you are offering will deliver those benefits. Who else would benefit from your research? Any local businesses? People you could do a little bit of work for to get some money coming in?
How will you deliver the benefits, as a product or as a service? A service such as providing consultancy is a treadmill. Every time you win a contract of some kind you turn right round and go to to win the next one. However, you can get started quickly, the lead in time is to getting the contract. If it is a product, you need development time, maybe a year or more to develop whatever it is to being commercially viable. You need support while you do this of some kind, which means investment. That might be your savings, combined with a working (and very understanding) spouse. Maybe its an investor. Even when you have built the product you still need to market and sell it. That is usually harder to do than invent the product in the first place. So this is what I mean by saying I am not sure that a someone without a basic income can do research without it becoming something that isn’t really research or not what you want to do. By looking hard at funding realities we inevitably come to thinking of how you operate as a business. Maybe a small consultancy business perhaps, but a business no less. Your service comes from your research expertise, any product needs to come from your imagination. I believe in business and science-based business in particular. I would encourage any young scientist to consider taking their skills and ideas directly to the market. It is how you can win independence. It takes courage and hard work, but it’s worth it. However, what matters is what you want to do with your life. Self-employment will give you a kind of independence, but it you have to think carefully about what is right for you.
If your research is software or data analysis based, then your costs are about as low as they could be, especially with pay-as-you-go computiing from Amazon, Microsoft and others coming along and the availability of open source scientific software and collaboration tools. Also the web gives multiple low cost routes to global markets which is starting to create a different set of possibilities for research scientists attaining their independence. Many of these are things we are working on offering through Inskpot, but its probably better to address those through the Inkspot site directly.
I would encourage any scientist, young or not so, to look into options for attaining their research independence. There are ways that it could be done outside of the conventional career structure, but it does require a very significant shift in thinking and it may change what you have to do by so much that it isn’t research any more. Good luck to you.
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