I think there are two separate versions of "private research" that people below are responding to. In one, a company has a problem and they pay researchers to work on it. The key metric is solving the problem or making progress on in depending on the time scale- good orgs have different scales (usually from 3 months to 5 years at most) that they are investing in. In this case, there is little room for fraud or deception, but it goes up with time scale because of how you frame early results. (I work doing applied research for companies, and they want and will only pay for something they can use to improve their business. Actually a lot of my time is spent helping make a clear connection between how research findings will move the needle on business objectives). I think it is this kind of research you, the parent, are referring to.
There is also "sponsored" research as others have pointed out, that is more of a bought study that a business hopes they can use for marketing. These have a big conflict.
I agree that government is probably the worst system in most cases. It's the same kind of "picking winners" that doesnt work in corporate funding. I'm from Canada where our tech industry basically runs on subsidies, and very little escapes the bubble of trying to get more government funding and actually becomes self sustaining.
Personally, I have seen there is a legit appetite for corporate funded research that advances the company's goals. As an academic, I would rather seek out companies for funding, knowing that I'm working in something that someone wants, and not trying to optimize for government priorities. I'm coming at this from a hard science perspective. I imagine the dynamics are very different for drug trials or other efficacy type studies, which are maybe more relevant to this discussion.
Good points, but there's another wrinkle. If a company pays a research institution to do a fraudulent study, the research institution risks losing their status as a reputable research outfit, and thereby loses a multiple of that as other companies avoid funding them.
A prestigious reputation is like glass - easy to break, very hard to put back together.
You'd think this would work with government funding, too. But it appears it does not. It could be because one's "reputation" is based on how many papers are published and how many cites. This is like rating a programmer on how many lines of code written.
Cites are supposed to be more analogous to how many times a programmers' library has been used.
Unless gamed, it _is_ a useful measure.
But if your programming ability was measured by how much are your libraries used (eg. in hiring, determining salary, seniority...), there would be every incentive to aim for your library to be used as much as possible even when it is superflouous.
I think the timescale point is an important one. For long timescales (and how long is long has changed over the years), government might be more likely to invest: eg. imagine the project of sending people to Moon: at the time, no private investor in the world could rival what Soviet Union or USA could dedicate to those projects — the price has gone down in a sense (or we've got richer individuals/companies), so you do see private investors in the field today, but there are always projects of the similar scale that might never happen if business returns are too far off.
There is also "sponsored" research as others have pointed out, that is more of a bought study that a business hopes they can use for marketing. These have a big conflict.
I agree that government is probably the worst system in most cases. It's the same kind of "picking winners" that doesnt work in corporate funding. I'm from Canada where our tech industry basically runs on subsidies, and very little escapes the bubble of trying to get more government funding and actually becomes self sustaining.
Personally, I have seen there is a legit appetite for corporate funded research that advances the company's goals. As an academic, I would rather seek out companies for funding, knowing that I'm working in something that someone wants, and not trying to optimize for government priorities. I'm coming at this from a hard science perspective. I imagine the dynamics are very different for drug trials or other efficacy type studies, which are maybe more relevant to this discussion.