There's a lot of consulting work available in traditional labs because of bureaucracy around hiring new employees full-time. So I can apply my skillsets in those labs as an outside consultant.
Ideally though this would be a pure-research endeavor. Which requires time and building up credentials and a funding base. So basically eventually income for the entire operation would be a mixture public/private grants and leasing out technology developed within the organization to others.
Are you worried that the necessity of getting those grants written/approved will push you into the same kind of incentive structure that you're trying to escape? Or is your theory that, yes, you'll have to deal with some of the same B.S. and incentive-skewing, but as long as you keep your burn low, it will be of a lower intensity?
He should be worried that the "skimming" he's talking about is, in many cases, legally mandated. Direct and indirect costs not being mixed isn't something that happened because universities wanted it that way.
I think that you will always have to deal with some amount of B.S. as long as you're spending other people's money. That's unavoidable.
The B.S. is amplified however when you're at a big institution. There's a lot more red-tape even if you have private financiers.
One way would be to yes, keep burn low. The idea there right would be that you're asking for less money, you're lowering expectations of those giving you money. If someone gives you $1000 they're going to micromanage you a lot less on how that money is used versus if they give you $10,000, $100,000, etc. The other idea is that if you have less stakeholders there's also less back and forth that needs to be maintained with them.
My idea would be that you'd avoid the incentive-skewing over the long term by doing some research that can be converted into revenue generators to cover the base costs of running a lab. Reinvesting profits into traditional finance products to get a yield on the lab's money. Even running a small scale cryptocurrency mining operation as a single part of revenue generation. If you combine this with low-overhead by being smart about what would typically be big ticket purchases that only the most well funded of labs can afford and finding people with a like mind who are willing to take a liveable(but smaller wage) to work in a more open environment then it should be sustainable. For me in particular I can balance research time with programming consulting time and make 80% of what I would make in Biology/BINF or at an academic institution without breaking a sweat.
Like I mentioned before about grant skimming by institutions.. If you're a PI at a state lab or university they will take a "generous" portion of your grant as soon as it arrives. I'm specifically thinking of one guy I know who recently had HALF of his grant taken for facility rental and upkeep. It was a large grant mind you. In another case a friend who had finished his postdoc and was a first time PI landed his first grant. As soon as it was in the lab managers tried to say "awesome, now we can pay your salary out of the grant" He had to play hardball with HR to state that his salary was guaranteed and not to be paid out of grant money intended for his research. Now I can understand why this happens. It's not free to run a research enterprise, and it's not particularly cheap when you're buying equipment at MSRP. Research equipment in the second hand market before it goes to professional refurbishers is literally cents on the dollar. It's so specialized, there's a small market for it, and big players are not buying this stuff because of the inherent risk! In my experience though the defect rate is so absurdly low that it's not an actual risk buying this equipment. But it's not something an institution with a multi-million dollar grant to setup a research center/core is going to waste their time on.
As for specifics of what I'm aiming to do. I intentionally picked a research area I'm going to delve into that has low costs. An operation like I'm talking about in my OP would not be feasible for high energy physics or high cost sequencing projects. I'm focusing on photobioreactor design and algae cultivation yields for animal feed, biodiesel refining, etc.
For that I need CO2 incubators, centrifuges, a 3d printer, algae samples, a sample freezer, turbidimeters, photospectrometers, pH meters, and then a revolving supply of plant fertilizers, CO2, and Nitrogen. But before I get deep into actual PBR design and cultivation techniques I'm going to work on computational models for PBR design, algae growth rates, and PBR monitoring software for data collection.
> One way would be to yes, keep burn low. The idea there right would be that you're asking for less money, you're lowering expectations of those giving you money. If someone gives you $1000 they're going to micromanage you a lot less on how that money is used versus if they give you $10,000, $100,000, etc. The other idea is that if you have less stakeholders there's also less back and forth that needs to be maintained with them.
You do have to be careful about the fixed costs for them administering the grant however. The time and effort of reviewing and approving / rejecting a $1000 request is not going to be a fraction of a percent of a much larger request. Lower perhaps but proportionally higher. And by promising much less, you might not really make it more appealing.
Again, indirect costs do not come out of the direct costs of running the project.
If you get a $250,000 a year NIH R01 (the largest you can get without PITA budget details) and your institution has negotiated a 50% rate, the NIH pays your institution $375,000 a year. Your $250K doesn't get reduced.
The only time I've ever had something like what you described happen was when a private funder had X total amount they wanted to spend, but hadn't bothered pre-specifying that they'd only pay a particular overhead rate. Which is mainly just a company wanting to get something for nothing, and doesn't leave me particularly sympathetic.
It's kind of a mix. Many agencies and calls say that the maximum amount you can budget is say, $500K over 3 years including indirect costs. So you'll say the project costs $350K and allocate $150K to indirects. If indirects were lower, you could up your direct costs.
It's not only private funders who do this. It's the biggest funding agencies in the United States. NSF, DARPA, Army, etc. In fact, I feel most grants operate this way. I'm not sure about NIH since I've only been Co-I on those.
The NIH is by far the largest funder of research in the U.S., so "most grants" has to include them.
You are correct that there are grants from agencies with a cap including indirect costs - I confess I have the opposite experience of you, I'm usually the Co-I on NSF-style grants, so I don't look at them much.
In that case, yes, if indirects were lower you could up your direct costs. I still contest the idea that the indirect cost system is somehow stealing "your" grant money though (where you = lab).
I didn't use the word "stealing", but they take a cut from the grant money allocated to the PI.
Maybe here is another perspective. NSF "Smalls" in my program are 500K, and Army "YIPs" are 360K. If I get a Small or a YIP, and my friend at another university with half the overhead gets the same Small or YIP, my friend will get more spending money than me.
I get 300K on the Small, and my friend gets 380K. To do the essentially same unit quantity of research. A university with a higher overhead takes 80K more from the grant that would have gone to the lab.
There's a lot of consulting work available in traditional labs because of bureaucracy around hiring new employees full-time. So I can apply my skillsets in those labs as an outside consultant.
Ideally though this would be a pure-research endeavor. Which requires time and building up credentials and a funding base. So basically eventually income for the entire operation would be a mixture public/private grants and leasing out technology developed within the organization to others.