What changes are needed in the way basic and applied research are funded?
Achieving the maximum efficiencies possible in both transportation and building will require significant scientific advances, many of them taking ten, twenty or more years to achieve. Experience of the past few decades has shown that such time horizons are incompatible with the parameters established by financial markets that require companies to demonstrate performance every quarter or year. Whether you are talking about basic or applied research, long-term research simply is not well-suited to the abbreviated time frames of the private sector and neither are many of the risks associated with such research acceptable to most financial investors. As a result, over the past thirty years, the United States has evolved toward a system in which funding of long-term basic research has become the province of the federal government and investment in short-term applied research and development has remained largely in the domain of private industry. Market forces alone, however, cannot drive th
