Well, it is really difficult to define the best possible conditions towards excelling in research. It is almost certain that situation varies significantly from one field to another and is also certain that it is not just a question of support.
French research has been primarily structured around public research institutions like for example Cnrs (sciences/humanities), Inria (computer science/applied mathematics), Cea (nuclear, physics, etc...), Inserm (biology) and secondary around higher education institutions like Universities or Grandes Ecoles. The common denominator for almost all these institutions is that fact that research scientists or professors are stated-funded and their research activities was primarily supported through direct funding schemas (eighties, nineties) towards research institutions. Such a policy has created a rather unbalanced fragmentation of the higher educational system where Research Institutions were there to carry our research, Universities to form students and Grandes Ecoles to form the elites. Direct research funding was possible due to the relatively small population of research scientists who had to go through a highly competitive hiring process. Despite a huge number of great success stories, such a system was not sustainable. The disconnection of research from the higher education produced a huge gap between the elites and the research world which led to a deficiency of industrial research and funding as well as technological transfer. Furthermore, the research funding deficiency for the academic faculty has led to their marginalization in terms of research performance expectations reducing their role to pure teaching.
The situation has changed over the past two decades. It became evident that disconnecting research from the academic world was not such a great idea, while at the same time the direct funding model has reached its limits due to the substantial increase of research personnel as well as the declining support from the state. Internationalization has shown that indeed a professor can be an excellent researcher as well and a gradual philosophy shift was observed where particular emphasis was paid towards strengthening the research ambitions of universities/grandes ecoles through a progressive decrease of direct funding and its transformation to "competitive" one. Such a transformation seems like a great idea, which though couldn't be implemented successfully due to insufficient support of the state (I have hard time to figure out the ratio between direct and indirect funding) resulting to state-employees salaries that are far from being competitive at international level as well as lack of solid "environment" research support. Once the deficiency of the state funding is coupled with the substantial direct funding schema and the constant request towards increasing the number of state-paid researchers we have the perfect storm to kill scientific excellence.
- Due to state policies research personnel being accommodated with the direct funding model "unwilling"/"inefficient" to seek for competitive funding (France's contribution to EU funding is higher to the amount that French institutions do recover from it)
- Research personnel (actually for the past five years new openings correspond to people who retired) is not renewed since there are no pathways (in both directions) between the research institutions and the higher education ,
- Research conditions that are constantly degrading where both direct and indirect funding become insufficient to guarantee descent personal and professional conditions while being non competitive at international level,
- Constant increase of research population (which is not necessarily a bad thing) where research activities are replicated among public-funded institutions without even making a minimal consolidation effort even when there is a geographic proximity.
- Research personnel being obstructed from obscure bureaucratic rules regarding research portfolio, promotions and research funding
- Research personnel being disconnected from industry and industrial needs with limited interest on technology transfer (working on industrial problems is not the solution, but there so many problems in industry that require fantastic science for solving them).
These conditions (that have been around for almost three decades) define the philosophy of mass: hire as much research personnel as you can, do not really care regarding their conditions, do not really care on what happens to the ones lost in "traffic", do not really care on the replication of efforts and do distribute direct and indirect funding as uniformly as possible. The counter argument for these conditions is the fact that you are a public-servant and you have a life-time position where you can have complete freedom...However, people are deciding to follow this path are highly motivated and therefore some of them will excel because of their personal motivation, dedication and hard work without much of help form the system being in place from the state.
Having said the above it is important that policy makers take action towards excellence and not towards mass preservation. Increase of competitive funding, decrease of direct funding, consolidation of efforts/organisms/funding schemas/simplification of procedures/...
* Note 1: I am mostly familiar with the applied mathematics/computer science field and therefore these ideas might not be that valuable in other fields.
Having said the above it is important that policy makers take action towards excellence and not towards mass preservation. Increase of competitive funding, decrease of direct funding, consolidation of efforts/organisms/funding schemas/simplification of procedures/...
* Note 1: I am mostly familiar with the applied mathematics/computer science field and therefore these ideas might not be that valuable in other fields.
