Let's cooperate more, not less
Ten years ago, just after mid-day, I walked down the gang plank from the Thomas Schulte (a container ship), stepped onto the warf at the Ports of Auckland, and began my new life in Aotearoa New Zealand. It was exciting. I had a full time permanent senior scientist position where I expected to carry on sharing the genetic analysis tools that I had developed with my colleagues at Cornell University. Not long after, we got news from MBIE that our $12M 6 year enabling technologies grant had been funded. Yipee!
I looked forward to working with researchers across the motu, collaborating and cooperating - building out capability together. My previous seven years were spent with a group that worked the way I do - share what you know and how you do what you do with anyone and everyone with an interest. Publicly funded research should benefit the public as much and as easily as possible.
Imagine my surprise and chagrin when it turned out that competition was a key underlying principle of the New Zealand research system architecture. Never mind what was said to me, or written in the grant. Competition is king. Every institution in the RSI system seems to compete against every other one, on the whole. There are occasional alliances that tend to last just about as long as whatever grant the government required cooperation on paper. Even that word, alliance, hints to competition against some other group.
This environment of ingrained competition resulted in, what I can only characterise, as bizarre behaviors. Where owning something (whether software or nebulous I.P.) was a KPI that was more important than improving research or the research sector. An attitude of me before we, or so it seemed. I lasted about 18 months in that environment. It took 2 goes at resigning before I got out. It took a bit of time to recover. Once I did, I got right back to sharing - mostly working internationally where one can just naturally cooperate easily.
There is certainly a place for competition, but it is not every place. Perhaps it is not most places.
Rob Campbell has some thoughts on this too.
