Corporation

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

McDonald's Corporation is one of the most recognizable corporations in the world.

 

A corporation is an organization, usually a group of people or a company, authorized to act as a single entity (legally a person) and recognized as such in law. Early incorporated entities were established by charter (i.e. by an ad hoc act granted by a monarch or passed by a parliament or legislature). Most jurisdictions now allow the creation of new corporations through registration. 

Corporations come in many different types but are usually divided by the law of the jurisdiction where they are chartered into two kinds: by whether they can issue stock or not, or by whether they are formed to make a profit or not. Corporations can be divided by the number of owners: corporation aggregate or corporation sole. The subject of this article is a corporation aggregate. A corporation sole is a legal entity consisting of a single ("sole") incorporated office, occupied by a single ("sole") natural person. 

Where local law distinguishes corporations by the ability to issue stock, corporations allowed to do so are referred to as "stock corporations", ownership of the corporation is through stock, and owners of stock are referred to as "stockholders" or "shareholders". Corporations not allowed to issue stock are referred to as "non-stock" corporations; those who are considered the owners of a non-stock corporation are persons (or other entities) who have obtained membership in the corporation and are referred to as a "member" of the corporation.

Corporations chartered in regions where they are distinguished by whether they are allowed to be for profit or not are referred to as "for profit" and "not-for-profit" corporations, respectively. 

There is some overlap between stock/non-stock and for-profit/not-for-profit in that not-for-profit corporations are always non-stock as well. A for-profit corporation is almost always a stock corporation, but some for-profit corporations may choose to be non-stock. To simplify the explanation, whenever "Stockholder" or "shareholder" is used in the rest of this article to refer to a stock corporation, it is presumed to mean the same as "member" for a non-profit corporation or for a profit, non-stock corporation.

Registered corporations have legal personality and their shares are owned by shareholders whose liability is generally limited to their investment. Shareholders do not typically actively manage a corporation; shareholders instead elect or appoint a board of directors to control the corporation in a fiduciary capacity. In most circumstances, a shareholder may also serve as a director or officer of a corporation.

In American English, the word corporation is most often used to describe large business corporations. In British English and in the Commonwealth countries, the term company is more widely used to describe the same sort of entity while the word corporation encompasses all incorporated entities. In American English, the word company can include entities such as partnerships that would not be referred to as companies in British English as they are not a separate legal entity.

Late in the 19th century, a new form of company having the limited liability protections of a corporation, and the more favorable tax treatment of either a sole proprietorship or partnership was developed. While not a corporation, this new type of entity became very attractive as an alternative for corporations not needing to issue stock. In Germany, the organization was referred to as Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung or GmbH. In the last quarter of the 20th Century this new form of non-corporate organization became available in the United States and other countries, and was known as the limited liability company or LLC. Since the GmbH and LLC forms of organization are technically not corporations (even though they have many of the same features), they will not be discussed in this article.

History

1/8 share of the Stora Kopparberg mine, dated June 16, 1288.

 

The word "corporation" derives from corpus, the Latin word for body, or a "body of people". By the time of Justinian (reigned 527–565), Roman law recognized a range of corporate entities under the names universitas, corpus or collegium. These included the state itself (the Populus Romanus), municipalities, and such private associations as sponsors of a religious cult, burial clubs, political groups, and guilds of craftsmen or traders. Such bodies commonly had the right to own property and make contracts, to receive gifts and legacies, to sue and be sued, and, in general, to perform legal acts through representatives. Private associations were granted designated privileges and liberties by the emperor.

Entities which carried on business and were the subjects of legal rights were found in ancient Rome, and the Maurya Empire in ancient India. In medieval Europe, churches became incorporated, as did local governments, such as the Pope and the City of London Corporation. The point was that the incorporation would survive longer than the lives of any particular member, existing in perpetuity. The alleged oldest commercial corporation in the world, the Stora Kopparberg mining community in Falun, Sweden, obtained a charter from King Magnus Eriksson in 1347.

In medieval times, traders would do business through common law constructs, such as partnerships. Whenever people acted together with a view to profit, the law deemed that a partnership arose. Early guilds and livery companies were also often involved in the regulation of competition between traders.

Mercantilism

Replica of an East Indiaman of the Dutch East India Company/United East Indies Company. The Dutch East India Company (VOC) is often considered by many to be the first historical model of the modern corporation. The VOC was also the first permanently organized limited-liability joint-stock corporation, with a permanent capital base.

 

Dutch and English chartered companies, such as the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and the Hudson's Bay Company, were created to lead the colonial ventures of European nations in the 17th century. Acting under a charter sanctioned by the Dutch government, the Dutch East India Company defeated Portuguese forces and established itself in the Moluccan Islands in order to profit from the European demand for spices. Investors in the VOC were issued paper certificates as proof of share ownership, and were able to trade their shares on the original Amsterdam Stock Exchange. Shareholders were also explicitly granted limited liability in the company's royal charter.

A bond issued by the Dutch East India Company (VOC), dating from 1623, for the amount of 2,400 florins

 

In England, the government created corporations under a royal charter or an Act of Parliament with the grant of a monopoly over a specified territory. The best-known example, established in 1600, was the East India Company of London. Queen Elizabeth I granted it the exclusive right to trade with all countries to the east of the Cape of Good Hope. Some corporations at this time would act on the government's behalf, bringing in revenue from its exploits abroad. Subsequently, the Company became increasingly integrated with English and later British military and colonial policy, just as most corporations were essentially dependent on the Royal Navy's ability to control trade routes.

Labeled by both contemporaries and historians as "the grandest society of merchants in the universe", the English East India Company would come to symbolize the dazzlingly rich potential of the corporation, as well as new methods of business that could be both brutal and exploitative. On 31 December 1600, Queen Elizabeth I granted the company a 15-year monopoly on trade to and from the East Indies and Africa. By 1711, shareholders in the East India Company were earning a return on their investment of almost 150 per cent. Subsequent stock offerings demonstrated just how lucrative the Company had become. Its first stock offering in 1713–1716 raised £418,000, its second in 1717–1722 raised £1.6 million.

A similar chartered company, the South Sea Company, was established in 1711 to trade in the Spanish South American colonies, but met with less success. The South Sea Company's monopoly rights were supposedly backed by the Treaty of Utrecht, signed in 1713 as a settlement following the War of the Spanish Succession, which gave Great Britain an asiento to trade in the region for thirty years. In fact the Spanish remained hostile and let only one ship a year enter. Unaware of the problems, investors in Britain, enticed by extravagant promises of profit from company promoters bought thousands of shares. By 1717, the South Sea Company was so wealthy (still having done no real business) that it assumed the public debt of the British government. This accelerated the inflation of the share price further, as did the Bubble Act 1720, which (possibly with the motive of protecting the South Sea Company from competition) prohibited the establishment of any companies without a Royal Charter. The share price rose so rapidly that people began buying shares merely in order to sell them at a higher price, which in turn led to higher share prices. This was the first speculative bubble the country had seen, but by the end of 1720, the bubble had "burst", and the share price sank from £1000 to under £100. As bankruptcies and recriminations ricocheted through government and high society, the mood against corporations and errant directors was bitter. 

Chart of the South Sea Company's stock prices. The rapid inflation of the stock value in the 1710s led to the Bubble Act 1720, which restricted the establishment of companies without a royal charter.

 

In the late 18th century, Stewart Kyd, the author of the first treatise on corporate law in English, defined a corporation as

a collection of many individuals united into one body, under a special denomination, having perpetual succession under an artificial form, and vested, by policy of the law, with the capacity of acting, in several respects, as an individual, particularly of taking and granting property, of contracting obligations, and of suing and being sued, of enjoying privileges and immunities in common, and of exercising a variety of political rights, more or less extensive, according to the design of its institution, or the powers conferred upon it, either at the time of its creation, or at any subsequent period of its existence.

— A Treatise on the Law of Corporations, Stewart Kyd (1793–1794)

Development of modern company law

Due to the late 18th century abandonment of mercantilist economic theory and the rise of classical liberalism and laissez-faire economic theory due to a revolution in economics led by Adam Smith and other economists, corporations transitioned from being government or guild affiliated entities to being public and private economic entities free of governmental directions. Smith wrote in his 1776 work The Wealth of Nations that mass corporate activity could not match private entrepreneurship, because people in charge of others' money would not exercise as much care as they would with their own.

Deregulation

"Jack and the Giant Joint-Stock", a cartoon in Town Talk (1858) satirizing the 'monster' joint-stock economy that came into being after the Joint Stock Companies Act 1844.

 

The British Bubble Act 1720's prohibition on establishing companies remained in force until its repeal in 1825. By this point, the Industrial Revolution had gathered pace, pressing for legal change to facilitate business activity. The repeal was the beginning of a gradual lifting on restrictions, though business ventures (such as those chronicled by Charles Dickens in Martin Chuzzlewit) under primitive companies legislation were often scams. Without cohesive regulation, proverbial operations like the "Anglo-Bengalee Disinterested Loan and Life Assurance Company" were undercapitalised ventures promising no hope of success except for richly paid promoters.

The process of incorporation was possible only through a royal charter or a private act and was limited, owing to Parliament's jealous protection of the privileges and advantages thereby granted. As a result, many businesses came to be operated as unincorporated associations with possibly thousands of members. Any consequent litigation had to be carried out in the joint names of all the members and was almost impossibly cumbersome. Though Parliament would sometimes grant a private act to allow an individual to represent the whole in legal proceedings, this was a narrow and necessarily costly expedient, allowed only to established companies.

Then, in 1843, William Gladstone became the chairman of a Parliamentary Committee on Joint Stock Companies, which led to the Joint Stock Companies Act 1844, regarded as the first modern piece of company law. The Act created the Registrar of Joint Stock Companies, empowered to register companies by a two-stage process. The first, provisional, stage cost £5 and did not confer corporate status, which arose after completing the second stage for another £5. For the first time in history, it was possible for ordinary people through a simple registration procedure to incorporate. The advantage of establishing a company as a separate legal person was mainly administrative, as a unified entity under which the rights and duties of all investors and managers could be channeled.

Limited liability

However, there was still no limited liability and company members could still be held responsible for unlimited losses by the company. The next, crucial development, then, was the Limited Liability Act 1855, passed at the behest of the then Vice President of the Board of Trade, Mr. Robert Lowe. This allowed investors to limit their liability in the event of business failure to the amount they invested in the company – shareholders were still liable directly to creditors, but just for the unpaid portion of their shares. (The principle that shareholders are liable to the corporation had been introduced in the Joint Stock Companies Act 1844).

The 1855 Act allowed limited liability to companies of more than 25 members (shareholders). Insurance companies were excluded from the act, though it was standard practice for insurance contracts to exclude action against individual members. Limited liability for insurance companies was allowed by the Companies Act 1862.

This prompted the English periodical The Economist to write in 1855 that "never, perhaps, was a change so vehemently and generally demanded, of which the importance was so much overrated." The major error of this judgment was recognised by the same magazine more than 70 years later, when it claimed that, "[t]he economic historian of the future... may be inclined to assign to the nameless inventor of the principle of limited liability, as applied to trading corporations, a place of honour with Watt and Stephenson, and other pioneers of the Industrial Revolution." 

These two features – a simple registration procedure and limited liability – were subsequently codified into the landmark 1856 Joint Stock Companies Act. This was subsequently consolidated with a number of other statutes in the Companies Act 1862, which remained in force for the rest of the century, up to and including the time of the decision in Salomon v A Salomon & Co Ltd.

The legislation shortly gave way to a railway boom, and from then, the numbers of companies formed soared. In the later nineteenth century, depression took hold, and just as company numbers had boomed, many began to implode and fall into insolvency. Much strong academic, legislative and judicial opinion was opposed to the notion that businessmen could escape accountability for their role in the failing businesses.

Further developments

Lindley LJ was the leading expert on partnerships and company law in the Salomon v. Salomon & Co. case. The landmark case confirmed the distinct corporate identity of the company.

 

In 1892, Germany introduced the Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung with a separate legal personality and limited liability even if all the shares of the company were held by only one person. This inspired other countries to introduce corporations of this kind. 

The last significant development in the history of companies was the 1897 decision of the House of Lords in Salomon v. Salomon & Co. where the House of Lords confirmed the separate legal personality of the company, and that the liabilities of the company were separate and distinct from those of its owners.

In the United States, forming a corporation usually required an act of legislation until the late 19th century. Many private firms, such as Carnegie's steel company and Rockefeller's Standard Oil, avoided the corporate model for this reason (as a trust). State governments began to adopt more permissive corporate laws from the early 19th century, although these were all restrictive in design, often with the intention of preventing corporations from gaining too much wealth and power.

New Jersey was the first state to adopt an "enabling" corporate law, with the goal of attracting more business to the state, in 1896. In 1899, Delaware followed New Jersey's lead with the enactment of an enabling corporate statute, but Delaware only became the leading corporate state after the enabling provisions of the 1896 New Jersey corporate law were repealed in 1913.

The end of the 19th century saw the emergence of holding companies and corporate mergers creating larger corporations with dispersed shareholders. Countries began enacting anti-trust laws to prevent anti-competitive practices and corporations were granted more legal rights and protections. The 20th century saw a proliferation of laws allowing for the creation of corporations by registration across the world, which helped to drive economic booms in many countries before and after World War I. Another major post World War I shift was toward the development of conglomerates, in which large corporations purchased smaller corporations to expand their industrial base. 

Starting in the 1980s, many countries with large state-owned corporations moved toward privatization, the selling of publicly owned (or 'nationalised') services and enterprises to corporations. Deregulation (reducing the regulation of corporate activity) often accompanied privatization as part of a laissez-faire policy.

Ownership and control

A corporation is, at least in theory, owned and controlled by its members. In a joint-stock company the members are known as shareholders and each of their shares in the ownership, control, and profits of the corporation is determined by the portion of shares in the company that they own. Thus a person who owns a quarter of the shares of a joint-stock company owns a quarter of the company, is entitled to a quarter of the profit (or at least a quarter of the profit given to shareholders as dividends) and has a quarter of the votes capable of being cast at general meetings.

In another kind of corporation, the legal document which established the corporation or which contains its current rules will determine who the corporation's members are. Who a member is depends on what kind of corporation is involved. In a worker cooperative, the members are people who work for the cooperative. In a credit union, the members are people who have accounts with the credit union.

The day-to-day activities of a corporation are typically controlled by individuals appointed by the members. In some cases, this will be a single individual but more commonly corporations are controlled by a committee or by committees. Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of committee structure.

• A single committee known as a board of directors is the method favored in most common law countries. Under this model, the board of directors is composed of both executive and non-executive directors, the latter being meant to supervise the former's management of the company.
• A two-tiered committee structure with a supervisory board and a managing board is common in civil law countries.

Formation

Historically, corporations were created by a charter granted by government. Today, corporations are usually registered with the state, province, or national government and regulated by the laws enacted by that government. Registration is the main prerequisite to the corporation's assumption of limited liability. The law sometimes requires the corporation to designate its principal address, as well as a registered agent (a person or company designated to receive legal service of process). It may also be required to designate an agent or other legal representative of the corporation.

Generally, a corporation files articles of incorporation with the government, laying out the general nature of the corporation, the amount of stock it is authorized to issue, and the names and addresses of directors. Once the articles are approved, the corporation's directors meet to create bylaws that govern the internal functions of the corporation, such as meeting procedures and officer positions.

The law of the jurisdiction in which a corporation operates will regulate most of its internal activities, as well as its finances. If a corporation operates outside its home state, it is often required to register with other governments as a foreign corporation, and is almost always subject to laws of its host state pertaining to employment, crimes, contracts, civil actions, and the like.

Naming

Corporations generally have a distinct name. Historically, some corporations were named after their membership: for instance, "The President and Fellows of Harvard College". Nowadays, corporations in most jurisdictions have a distinct name that does not need to make reference to their membership. In Canada, this possibility is taken to its logical extreme: many smaller Canadian corporations have no names at all, merely numbers based on a registration number (for example, "12345678 Ontario Limited"), which is assigned by the provincial or territorial government where the corporation incorporates.

In most countries, corporate names include a term or an abbreviation that denotes the corporate status of the entity (for example, "Incorporated" or "Inc." in the United States) or the limited liability of its members (for example, "Limited" or "Ltd."). These terms vary by jurisdiction and language. In some jurisdictions, they are mandatory, and in others they are not. Their use puts everybody on constructive notice that they are dealing with an entity whose liability is limited: one can only collect from whatever assets the entity still controls when one obtains a judgment against it.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the use of the word "company" alone to denote corporate status, since the word "company" may refer to a partnership or some other form of collective ownership (in the United States it can be used by a sole proprietorship but this is not generally the case elsewhere).

Personhood

Despite not being individual human beings, corporations, as far as US law is concerned, are legal persons, and have many of the same rights and responsibilities as natural persons do. For example, a corporation can own property, and can sue or be sued. Corporations can exercise human rights against real individuals and the state, and they can themselves be responsible for human rights violations. Corporations can be "dissolved" either by statutory operation, order of court, or voluntary action on the part of shareholders. Insolvency may result in a form of corporate failure, when creditors force the liquidation and dissolution of the corporation under court order, but it most often results in a restructuring of corporate holdings. Corporations can even be convicted of criminal offenses, such as fraud and manslaughter. However, corporations are not considered living entities in the way that humans are.

Funding of science

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Research funding is a term generally covering any funding for scientific research, in the areas of both "hard" science and technology and social science. The term often connotes funding obtained through a competitive process, in which potential research projects are evaluated and only the most promising receive funding. Such processes, which are run by government, corporations or foundations, allocate scarce funds.

Most research funding comes from two major sources, corporations (through research and development departments) and government (primarily carried out through universities and specialized government agencies; often known as research councils). Some small amounts of scientific research are carried out (or funded) by charitable foundations, especially in relation to developing cures for diseases such as cancer, malaria and AIDS.

According to OECD, more than 60% of research and development in scientific and technical fields is carried out by industries, and 20% and 10% respectively by universities and government.

Comparatively, in countries with less GDP, such as Portugal and Mexico the industry contribution is significantly lower. The US government spends more than other countries on military R&D, although the proportion has fallen from around 30% in the 1980s to under 20. Government funding for medical research amounts to approximately 36% in the U.S. The government funding proportion in certain industries is higher, and it dominates research in social science and humanities. Similarly, with some exceptions (e.g. biotechnology) government provides the bulk of the funds for basic scientific research. In commercial research and development, all but the most research-oriented corporations focus more heavily on near-term commercialization possibilities rather than "blue-sky" ideas or technologies.

History

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as the pace of technological progress increased before and during the industrial revolution, most scientific and technological research was carried out by individual inventors using their own funds. A system of patents was developed to allow inventors a period of time (often twenty years) to commercialise their inventions and recoup a profit, although in practice many found this difficult. The talents of an inventor are not those of a businessman, and there are many examples of inventors (e.g. Charles Goodyear) making rather little money from their work whilst others were able to market it.

In the twentieth century, scientific and technological research became increasingly systematised, as corporations developed, and discovered that continuous investment in research and development could be a key element of success in a competitive strategy. It remained the case, however, that imitation by competitors - circumventing or simply flouting patents, especially those registered abroad - was often just as successful a strategy for companies focused on innovation in matters of organisation and production technique, or even in marketing. A classic example is that of Wilkinson Sword and Gillette in the disposable razor market, where the former has typically had the technological edge, and the latter the commercial one.

By country

Different countries spend vastly different amounts on research, in both absolute and relative terms. For instance, South Korea and Israel spend more than 4% of their GDP on research while many Arabic countries spend less than 1% (e.g. Saudi Arabia 0.25%).

United States

The US spent $456.1 billion for research and development (R&D) in 2013, the most recent year for which such figures are available, according to the National Science Foundation. The private sector accounted for $322.5 billion, or 71%, of total national expenditures, with universities and colleges spending $64.7 billion, or 14%, in second place.

Switzerland

Switzerland spent CHF 22 billion for R&D in 2015 with an increase of 10.5% compared with 2012 when the last survey was conducted. In relative terms, this represents 3.4% of the country's GDP. R&D activities are carried out by nearly 125,000 individuals, mostly in the private sector (71%) and higher education institutions (27%).

Process

Often scientists apply for research funding which a granting agency may (or may not) approve to financially support. These grants require a lengthy process as the granting agency can inquire about the researcher(s)'s background, the facilities used, the equipment needed, the time involved, and the overall potential of the scientific outcome. The process of grant writing and grant proposing is a somewhat delicate process for both the grantor and the grantee: the grantors want to choose the research that best fits their scientific principles, and the individual grantees want to apply for research in which they have the best chances but also in which they can build a body of work towards future scientific endeavors.

The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council in the United Kingdom has devised an alternative method of fund-distribution: the sandpit.

Most universities have research administration offices to facilitate the interaction between the researcher and the granting agency. "Research administration is all about service—service to our faculty, to our academic units, to the institution, and to our sponsors. To be of service, we first have to know what our customers want and then determine whether or not we are meeting those needs and expectations."

In the United States of America, the National Council of University Research Administrators (NCURA) serves its members and advances the field of research administration through education and professional development programs, the sharing of knowledge and experience, and by fostering a professional, collegial, and respected community.

Public funding

Government-funded research can either be carried out by the government itself, or through grants to researchers outside the government. The bodies providing public funding are often referred to as research councils. 

Critics of basic research are concerned that research funding for the sake of knowledge itself does not contribute to a great return. However, scientific innovations often foreshadow or inspire further ideas unintentionally. For example, NASA's quest to put a man on the moon inspired them to develop better sound recording and reading technologies. NASA's research was furthered by the music industry, who used it to develop audio cassettes. Audio cassettes, being smaller and able to store more music, quickly dominated the music industry and increased the availability of music.

An additional distinction of government-sponsored research is that the government does not make a claim to the intellectual property, whereas private research-funding bodies sometimes claim ownership of the intellectual property that they are paying to have developed. Consequently, government-sponsored research more often allows the individual discoverer to file intellectual property claims over their own work.

List of research councils

Research councils are (usually public) bodies that provide research funding in the form of research grants or scholarships. These include arts councils and research councils for the funding of science.

An incomplete list of national and international pan-disciplinary public research councils:

Name	Location
National Scientific and Technical Research Council	Argentina
Australian Research Council	Australia
Austrian Research Promotion Agency	Austria
Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO)	Belgium
National Research Council	Canada
National Commission for Scientific Research and Technology	Chile
National Natural Science Foundation of China, Ministry of Science and Technology	China
European Research Council	European Union
National Agency for Research	France
German Research Foundation	Germany
Department of Science and Technology	India
Irish Research Council, Science Foundation Ireland	Ireland
National Research Council	Italy
National Research and Technology Council	Mexico
Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research	Netherlands
Research Council of Norway	Norway
Spanish National Research Council	Spain
National Research Council of Sri Lanka	Sri Lanka
Swedish Research Council	Sweden
Swiss National Science Foundation	Switzerland
National Research Council of Thailand	Thailand
Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey	Turkey
Research Councils UK	United Kingdom
National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health	United States
Danish Agency for Science, Technology and Innovation	Denmark
Israel Science Foundation	Israel
Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research	Netherlands
Icelandic Centre for Research	Iceland
Tekes (Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation)	Finland
Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (India)	India
National Research Foundation, Singapore	Singapore
National Research Foundation of South Africa	South Africa
National Research Foundation of Saudi Arabia	Saudi Arabia
Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation	Australia
Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico	Brazil
Uganda National Council for Science and Technology (UNCST)	Uganda
Srpska akademija nauke i umetnosti	Serbia

Private funding

Private funding for research comes from philanthropists, crowd-funding, private companies, non-profit foundations, and professional organizations. Philanthropists and foundations have been known to pour millions of dollars into a wide variety of scientific investigations, including basic research discovery, disease cures, particle physics, astronomy, marine science, and the environment. Many large technology companies spend billions of dollars on research and development each year to gain an innovative advantage over their competitors, though only about 42% of this funding goes towards projects that are considered substantially new, or capable of yielding radical breakthroughs. New scientific start-up companies initially seek funding from crowd-funding organizations, venture capitalists, and angel investors, gathering preliminary results using rented facilities, but aim to eventually become self-sufficient.

Examples of companies that fund basic research include IBM (high temperature superconductivity was discovered by IBM sponsored basic experimental research in 1986), L'Oreal (which created the L'Oreal-Unesco prize for women scientists and finances internships), AXA (which launched a Research Fund in 2008 and finances Academic Institutions such as advanced fundamental mathematics French Foundation IHES).

A company may share resources with a materials science society to gain proprietary knowledge or trained workers.

Hard money versus soft money

In academic contexts, hard money may refer to funding received from a government or other entity at regular intervals, thus providing a steady inflow of financial resources to the beneficiary. The antonym, soft money, refers to funding provided only through competitive research grants and the writing of grant proposals.

Hard money is usually issued by the government for the advancement of certain projects or for the benefit of specific agencies. Community healthcare, for instance, may be supported by the government by providing hard money. Since funds are disbursed regularly and continuously, the offices in charge of such projects are able to achieve their objectives more effectively than if they had been issued one-time grants.

Individual jobs at a research institute may be classified as "hard-money positions" or "soft-money positions"; the former are expected to provide job security because their funding is secure in the long term, whereas individual "soft-money" positions may come and go with fluctuations in the number of grants awarded to the institution.

Influence on research

The source of funding may introduce conscious or unconscious biases into a researcher's work. Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest (COIs) is used by biomedical journals to guarantee credibility and transparency of the scientific process. Conflict of interest disclosure, however, is not systematically nor consistently dealt with by journals which publish scientific research results. When research is funded by the same agency that can be expected to gain from a favorable outcome there is a potential for biased results and research shows that results are indeed more favorable than would be expected from a more objective view of the evidence. A 2003 systematic review studied the scope and impact of industry sponsorship in biomedical research. The researchers found financial relationships among industry, scientific investigators, and academic institutions widespread. Results showed a statistically significant association between industry sponsorship and pro-industry conclusions and concluded that "Conflicts of interest arising from these ties can influence biomedical research in important ways". A British study found that a majority of the members on national and food policy committees receive funding from food companies.

In an effort to cut costs, the pharmaceutical industry has turned to the use of private, nonacademic research groups (i.e., contract research organizations [CROs]) which can do the work for less money than academic investigators. In 2001 CROs came under criticism when the editors of 12 major scientific journals issued a joint editorial, published in each journal, on the control over clinical trials exerted by sponsors, particularly targeting the use of contracts which allow sponsors to review the studies prior to publication and withhold publication of any studies in which their product did poorly. They further criticized the trial methodology stating that researchers are frequently restricted from contributing to the trial design, accessing the raw data, and interpreting the results.

The Cochrane Collaboration, a worldwide group that aims to provide compiled scientific evidence to aid well informed health care decisions, conducts systematic reviews of randomized controlled trials of health care interventions and tries to disseminate the results and conclusions derived from them. A few more recent reviews have also studied the results of non-randomized, observational studies. The systematic reviews are published in the Cochrane Library. A 2011 study done to disclose possible conflicts of interests [COI] in underlying research studies used for medical meta-analyses reviewed 29 meta-analyses and found that COIs in the studies underlying the meta-analyses were rarely disclosed. The 29 meta-analyses reviewed an aggregate of 509 randomized controlled trials (RCTs). Of these, 318 RCTs reported funding sources with 219 (69%) industry funded. 132 of the 509 RCTs reported author COI disclosures, with 91 studies (69%) disclosing industry financial ties with one or more authors. The information was, however, seldom reflected in the meta-analyses. Only two (7%) reported RCT funding sources and none reported RCT author-industry ties. The authors concluded "without acknowledgement of COI due to industry funding or author industry financial ties from RCTs included in meta-analyses, readers' understanding and appraisal of the evidence from the meta-analysis may be compromised."

In 2003 researchers looked at the association between authors' published positions on the safety and efficacy in assisting with weight loss of olestra, a fat substitute manufactured by the Procter & Gamble (P&G), and their financial relationships with the food and beverage industry. They found that supportive authors were significantly more likely than critical or neutral authors to have financial relationships with P&G and all authors disclosing an affiliation with P&G were supportive. The authors of the study concluded: "Because authors' published opinions were associated with their financial relationships, obtaining noncommercial funding may be more essential to maintaining objectivity than disclosing personal financial interests."

A 2005 study in the journal Nature surveyed 3247 US researchers who were all publicly funded (by the National Institutes of Health). Out of the scientists questioned, 15.5% admitted to altering design, methodology or results of their studies due to pressure of an external funding source.

A theoretical model has been established whose simulations imply that peer review and over-competitive research funding foster mainstream opinion to monopoly.

Efficiency of funding

Most funding agencies mandate efficient use of their funds, that is, they want to maximize outcome for their money spent. Outcome can be measured by publication output, citation impact, number of patents, number of PhDs awarded etc. Another question is how to allocate funds to different disciplines, institutions, or researchers. A recent study by Wayne Walsh found that “prestigious institutions had on average 65% higher grant application success rates and 50% larger award sizes, whereas less-prestigious institutions produced 65% more publications and had a 35% higher citation impact per dollar of funding.”