Does academia need better incentives to drive innovation?
Last week I attended a regional teaching session for colleagues doing integrated academic and clinical training. Lots of people in the room were at a career crossroads, thinking about ways to keep up their academic workstream in the next phase of their portfolio career.
There are issues with incentives in academia. It can be hard for people with potential to jump through the hoops necessary to get funding. In the US, the average age of investigators receiving their first grant was rising for years before the number of NIH-funded researchers past retirement age (66) began to outnumber those under 36 in the early 2000s, leading to policy shifts geared at getting funding to younger researchers.
Job security in academia is lacking. This can make people pivot away from continuing to pursue an academic career as they acquire more financial responsibilities. Stable employment opportunities become scarcer further up the career ladder which also contributes to attrition and may be a factor leading to gender imbalance in senior academic positions. In the UK, as NIHR award seniority increases from pre-doctoral to Research Professorship, the number of applications from females reduce.
Some aspects of academia such as peer review and PhD supervision have almost no incentive for researchers to participate in. In the case of peer review, there is rarely any direct reward for the time taken for an academic to review submitted research and feedback to a journal on whether they would recommend it for publication. Peer review is an important aspect of academia which steers the evolving evidence base in a field, but without direct incentive it can be difficult for academics to prioritise this. Recent years have seen significant delays in publication timelines which can have policy implications.
While PhD students come with funding, some of which goes to the host institution, supervisors do not necessarily get direct reward for the work they take on in supervision- and many academics support multiple PhD students at a time for many years. In some cases, PhD students are working on an aspect of a senior academic’s portfolio and may be funded by their supervisor’s grant, but this is not always the case. There is professional benefit for the senior academic through involvement in the PhD student’s research and supporting a junior researcher build skills, and the Research Excellence Framework acknowledges this to some extent. However, academics are increasingly stretched between applying for funding, delivering impactful research and teaching commitments. Supervising PhD students is another longitudinal responsibility - so important for the future of academia and innovation but one that seems to depend heavily on good will, taking time away from other academic commitments.
Takeaways
Incentives are important in ensuring diversity in academia and will help drive innovation. While researchers are engaged in academic careers they need to be better incentivised to participate in the range of academic activity necessary to advance research. Access is important, but so is retention and incentives have a part to play in both.