Turning Chile into a knowledge society and economy is the overarching State goal of public policy to promote and support science, technology, knowledge and innovation (CTCI). This broad purpose is implemented through various specific policies, which face, among other challenges, the need to target public investment and make it more efficient. This is especially complex when the recipients of such public policies (typically delivered through competitive funds) are large universities and research centers, which legitimately have their own institutional goals and priorities.
Moreover, given the highly decentralized nature of these institutions, it is common to see applications to such funds, driven by research teams, that use these competitions as a way to advance their own agenda, which may or may not be aligned with the priorities of their institutional leadership. This is a fact known and accepted by all parties involved, although over time various mechanisms have been introduced to bring all the interests at stake into somewhat closer alignment.
Thus, although applying for many basic research projects remains the sole responsibility of the research team, the vast majority of larger funds require the institution itself to formally apply, which leads interested research teams to seek all the necessary institutional approvals (a path that may be longer or shorter depending on the institution), a stage at which each actor in the chain adds its own priorities to the application.
For example: if public policy seeks to promote crop resilience to floods caused by climate change and creates a 10-year competitive R&D&I fund for that purpose, many teams will see the opportunity, at last, to secure long-term funding for their research on the genetic improvement of tomatoes (which could, perhaps, be steered toward flood-resistant crops), or on algorithms for studying high currents (which could, perhaps, be used to predict floods), or on the development of new nanomaterials (which could, perhaps, be used to build flood-resistant infrastructure), and so on, a long list of great ideas that, with some good will, may coincide with the general objective of the public policy; but an institutional application must also take into account the priorities of the other stakeholders, which can range from increasing undergraduate enrollment to internationalization, including a greater presence in the regions or support for the social sciences.
Needless to say, it becomes even more complex when such projects are carried out by several institutions. For public policy, the need for these funds to contribute more directly and specifically to its objectives persists, and becomes more acute. One of the mechanisms introduced for this purpose is the requirement to set up an ad hoc legal entity to carry out the projects, with the various participants as founders. Regardless of the type of project, this tends to align the new legal entity fully with the interests of the public policy, although it also creates problems, some of which may be more or less severe depending on the type of institution (for example, in those closer to applied research, the participation of researchers who are employees of different institutions can lead to intellectual property conflicts).
However, it is important to bear in mind that by creating a new legal entity, one may be incubating the seed of the very problem one is trying to combat; the purpose of creating a new legal entity is to give it independence from the specific objectives of its founding entities and of the people who designed the project in the first place. But that independence also leads it to develop its own interests, and as it succeeds in its work, it grows, and sometimes that growth is not necessarily aligned with the public policy that gave rise to it. Although this can create friction, it is not necessarily negative and, moreover, it is part of the inevitable consequences of a public policy decision, which the authorities must take into account when designing their plans.
Read the original column at https://opinion.cooperativa.cl/opinion/ciencia-y-tecnologia/el-desafio-de-alinear-la-politica-publica-de-ctci/2025-02-14/172707.html
