Meeting on "Funding and Research" with Donald Gillies University College London and Emiliano Ippoliti University "Sapienza" Organized by Science & Philosophy Colloquia ROARS – Returns On Academic ReSearch Room x – Villa Mirafiori – via Carlo Fea 2 – Rome 20 May 2015 – 15:30-18:00

1. Francesco Sylos Labini
Excellence and reality

2. Saint Matthew
The age of
meritocracy
“The rich gets
richer and the
poor gets poorer”

6. Harvard Here Model

8. • Harvard operating expenses = 44% founds of all Italian universities
• Harvard has 21,000 students  130,000 euro/student
• Typically EU: 10,000 euro/student
66 Italian universities
BillionsofEuros

9. Harvard Here Model

10. High Tc Superconductivity
Nobel Prize in Physics 1987

11. High Tc Superconductivity

12. High Tc Superconductivity

13. High Tc Superconductivity

14. High Tc Superconductivity

15. High Tc Superconductivity

16. High Tc Superconductivity

17. Scanning Tunneling Microscope
Nobel Prize in Physics 1986

18. Scanning Tunneling Microscope

19. Scanning Tunneling Microscope

20. Scanning Tunneling Microscope

21. Giant Magneto Resistence
Nobel Prize in Physics 2007
(relevant paper 1988)

22. Giant Magneto Resistence

23. Giant Magneto Resistence

24. Scanning Tunneling Microscope

25. Giant Magneto Resistence

26. 2010
Graphene

27. 2010
Graphene

28. Graphene

29. Graphene

30. 2010
Graphene

31. Rischio e Ricerca

32. Rischio e Ricerca
1963

33. Ideology
Reality
Productivity
Competitiveness

34. Research is risk
Rewarding what is today recognised as excellence is
trivial !

35. “Reinforce
excellence,
dynamism and
creativity of
European research"

36. “ERC funds excellent
researchers”
ERC
Nobel Prize

37. Novoselov, K. S.; Geim, A. K.; Morozov,
S. V.; Jiang, D.; Zhang, Y.; Dubonos, S. V.;
Grigorieva, I. V.; Firsov, A. A. (2004).
Science 306 (5696): 666–669.
M. Brune, J.M. Raimond, P.
Goy, L. Davidovich and S.
Haroche, Phys. Rev. Lett. 59,
1899 (1987)

38. Research is risk
The real problem is to understand whom to reward
today, among the large magma of good quality
researchers, and how to pick those who would
become excellent tomorrow !

39. We conclude that scientific impact (as reflected by
publications) is only weakly limited by funding. We
suggest that funding strategies that target diversity,
rather than “excellence”, are likely to prove to be
more productive.
Research is risk

40. Country
Scientific Domain
Specialization

41. Country
Scientific Domain
Diversification !

42. Technological leading countries
beyond having the largest production of scientific
papers and the largest number of citations, do not
specialize in few scientific domains. Rather, they
diversify as much as possible their research system

43. Diversification
thus represents the key element that
correlates with scientific and
technological competitiveness