SAPC Dangerous Idea: funding research through Kickstarter
Sarah Knowles (@dr_know) is a Research Fellow at the University of Manchester. Her interests are mental health, applied health services research and patient and public involvement and engagement. Since 2012, the Society for Academic Primary Care has run a competition at their Annual Conference called the Dangerous Idea Soapbox. The soapbox offers primary care clinicians and researchers a platform to share a dangerous idea that they think needs to be heard by the Academic Primary Care community. Submissions are judged prior to acceptance based on how challenging and cutting edge they are. Those chosen are presented through lightning pitches (2 minutes, 1 slide) in the Soapbox session, after which the audience can debate the ideas presented with the speakers before a final vote to decide that year’s most dangerous idea. In 2015, I presented my idea that “Health research should be crowd funded through Kickstarter”, inspired by conversations with patients and members of the public involved in research, to challenge the audience with the idea that publicly funded research should have public backing before we’re allowed to get our hands on the money. Kickstarter is a crowdfunding platform. You don’t have a product available which people choose and you then sell, like you would in a shop. Instead, you ask for investment up front from potential ‘backers’ and if you don’t get enough promised custom then your product does...
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