There can be no innovation if it costs the researcher pocket money to investigate
History proves that the only pacific source of prosperity is commerce: free exchange of goods/services to meet customers’ demands at the agreed price. Apart from commerce, prosperity by pillaging the defeated has always been war. The dictatorial and war-like Sparta defeated a flourishing and commercial Athens 25 centuries ago. Commerce includes the sale of arms. Misery prevailed when there was no commerce, like in the Middle Ages. Commerce has always had enemies, like communists who hate private initiatives. Investigating is studying to know the answer to a problem. A research theme can be interesting to someone other than an author or not, who may be willing to pay or not. Today people are paid to publish. Imagine the usefulness of their research works. Innovating involves researching problems that customers are interested in, producing marketable knowledge. The public university does not innovate because culture and the incentives policy move in the opposite direction: research is done to promote oneself and to make that known. Enemies of commerce are also enemies of innovation, although they are camouflaged. For commerce to exist, it is necessary to have the will to meet demand; that is very risky: customers have to choose you among competitors and pay a price, be able to afford things and must have income to do so. Prosperous countries favour commerce with a free market economy in a virtuous setting with certain conditions: legal security; currency; economic freedom; reasonable taxes and social tax payments; flexible regulation; infrastructures; suitable business size; depoliticised and demanding education. A good solider must be brave and trained; innovation is not possible without running the risk by ignoring liberal commercial business principles. Since Zapatero’s government, the Spanish per capita income is the same; public debt has quadrupled; the middle class is disappearing; unemployment doubles the EU mean. Communist propaganda is set up in the politicised education system where any liberal principle is excluded, stigmatises private activity: “businesspeople exploit”; “commerce is stealing”, “profits are suspicious”. Quantitative scientific policy based on know-how and egalitarianism scorns the commercialisation of research by ill treating researchers: all costs of services for researchers are expensive because payments for their meals and accommodation have not been updated since 1997. Who will innovate if being worse off is guaranteed instead of making a profit! The quantitative hallucination, egalitarianism and mistrust are such that for one doctoral thesis to be defended, a university committee quantifies its quality in “equivalent hours”. No-one trusts anybody, the thesis director, the tribunal judging the thesis, and what some “wise people say in their academic ivory tower” prevails. What is marketable is a synonym of bad. The barrier between what is academic and what is marketable is such that, unlike the advanced world, private Spanish firms do not value academic doctorates, who are not acknowledged in employed doctors’ salary. What is worse, the Public Administration scorns doctorates when evaluating candidates for civil servant jobs who are valued several times less than those people knowing regional languages. As the academy scorns commerce, boasting is heard at universities and in regional governments. Every year dozens of dubious medals are handed out as if innovation flourished. The European sick of innovationless research agonises in Spain: according to Eurostat, for exporting intensity of high-tech products, Spain comes in 25th place out of 27 EU countries. Regarding net salaries, Spain is the country with the highest commercial deficit for such products of the four EU countries with the best economies. According to the Funcas think-tank, until 2018 the weight of high-tech exports over the total of Spanish exports was 5.5% when the EU mean was 11.7%. How can this nonsense be changed? Finance for research should consider private firms’ interests (the only ones that take risks). A commercial doctorate with doctorates going on placements in firms is urgent. Quantitative tyranny should allow entrepreneurship by setting marketable targets, and not only academic ones. Research will only be transformed into innovation by removing its enemies.