Yes, we know and we welcome it - Unicamp is a “research university”. The vocation for research permeates his way of teaching and his way of promoting extension activities. But... what do we mean by research? How and why do we divide it into applied and basic, allocating its varieties in different drawers? What research is done or should be done at university?
These questions bothered me when I was working on research at our National Institute of Science and Technology for Studies on the United States (NCT-Ineu). It focused on higher education, science and innovation policy in the United States. And I found myself faced with the difficulties faced by the typologies in use – basic science, applied science, development, what are they and how do they differ? I tried to select studies that discussed this type of classification, which is important for defining public policies for the sector. And that's why I looked more closely at a little book by Donald Stokes, published by Editora da Unicamp in 2005 - Pasteur's Quadrant – Basic science and technological innovation.
The figure of the quadrant, to which the title refers, exposes a typology organized based on two questions: (1) does the research we are talking about seek to understand the foundations of a field, build broad-spectrum theories and models? (2) does it take usage into account, is it targeted? Stokes constructs a diagram of the four types, each represented by a patron or ideal character.
In Stokes' diagram, the different forms of scientific investigation are combinations of these motivations and tendencies. The “ideal type” of research without utilitarian motivation and with a strong theoretical orientation is personified by Niels Bohr. Applied research, at the other extreme, is personified by Thomas Edison and his 'invention factory'. Pasteur's quadrant is the one that most intrigues and inspires Stokes, combining the two motivations: it revolutionizes the fundamentals and has a visible appeal for use.
Some time ago I commented, in another article, that Stokes' reflection had something strange about it – an empty quadrant. It is the quadrant of research that answers both questions: it is not driven by the search for foundations, theoretical models, nor by use, application. Now, is there anything missing in Stokes' scheme? I then put forward the hypothesis that in universities like ours – where postgraduate education occupies half or more of the resources and students – we should think seriously about this quadrant.
Comparison with other human activities seems useful to advance reflection. Farmers and breeders produce food, of course, but they also produce seeds and matrices. The University produces scientists, engineers, doctors... for industry, agriculture, banks, public and private services. And who produces the teachers and researchers for the university? Who produces teachers for the higher education network? This “special thing”, this specific and special competence is produced... with postgraduate studies and a research habit, the one we cultivate at university... even when it does not generate revolutionary theoretical models or innovations ready for dissemination and use.
In this way, I believe, I was finding a way to fill the empty cell in the Stokes diagram. In fact, in the diagram the space is empty, but, apparently, it was not absent in the author's thoughts, as the following passage indicates:
“There are cases in which the primary objective of research is to increase the skills of researchers....research projects in which researchers begin work in a new area, not for the discoveries they will make, but to gain skill and experience, which can later use "when problems arise in that area", or when major advances made by other researchers make the field important.”
At the risk of being repetitive, I emphasize what Stokes says. In this apparently empty quadrant, we can fit research whose central objective – what motivates it and composes its criteria for achievement – is not to produce new models to explain the foundations of a certain field of reality (natural or social). Nor is it producing some device or process that solves a certain practical challenge. It seeks, above all, to train researchers and expand their ability to see and innovate.
Much of the research we do in our universities results in the improvement of procedures and techniques, the creation of decisive intellectual tools for other research – and this is how we produce databases, archives and collections, records of experiments and observations, specialized dictionaries . And it is through this type of research that we form skills, produce things that are not necessarily in the laboratory closet or in theses and dissertations, but in people's minds.
The so-called formation of innovation capabilities is already a factor considered decisive in the development of modern countries – the production of tacit knowledge embedded in the skills of a turner, a chemical analyst or a scientific researcher, to name a few examples among many possible. The production of capabilities, of potential for innovation and invention, is what allows, for example, countries that are lagging behind in industrialization to move from imitation to adaptation and from this to invention and innovation.
One more aspect must be highlighted, so that the university can open its horizons. Relevant research, in any country that intends to have a future, needs to focus not only on knowledge aimed at modifying “inert nature” (or what we consider as such), but also at managing our own “natures”, the behavior and human relations. A great pioneer of development theories summarized this idea in a 1954 essay:
Economic development depends both on technological knowledge about living things and creatures and on social knowledge about man and his relationships with his fellow man. The first form of knowledge is often accentuated, but the second is equally important. Growth depends as much on knowing how to manage large-scale organizations, or creating institutions that favor the effort to save, as it does on knowing how to select new types of seeds, or build bigger dams. [William Arthur Lewis – The Theory of Economic Development]