They're a fickle bunch, but very rewarding to work with!
As one of those people, I'm happy to move to the middle of nowhere, IF it's for a place with a stellar reputation that's going to help me do good science and (unfortunately) has some name-brand recognition.
The best bet for a new research institute is to have a large endowment and recruit two or three large names in a field. People who already have a good reputation. The large endowment is necessary to prove that you will ongoing resources to keep the research funded into the future.
Doing a postdoc is itself a large bet that usually fails to pay off, retrospectively making both the PhD and the postdoc look like extremely poor choices by any monetary calculus. The supply of people who want to stay in Science/Research/Academia is a lot greater than the demand outside perhaps ML/AI. Even fields with great outside options for PhDs, like Economics, Computer Science or Engineering have enormous competition for academic jobs, or para-academic ones, like adjuncting.
In Canada, an Adjunct Professor is unpaid, but actually somewhat prestigious. It is a recognition of your abilities in a field and might be given to someone in industry who collaborates with a researcher at the university (for example).
That was originally how it was used in the U.S. too. "Someone who needs a non-permanent affiliation with the University to teach some classes" - usually someone from industry or the community, etc. whose expertise was valuable to the educational mission.
The modern version is...sort of depressing.
I think in the US, almost anyone with a job at a college is a 'professor'. You see 'professors' in their late 20s or early 30s.
In Industry, you can come from no-name university, and you can still make it to FAANG (or top tier companies). In academia, that's impossible. To start, it is impossible to make it to good PhD program without publishing papers in top-tier conference, MSc student in no-name universities can't afford finding advisor to easily do that. Good PhD programs will help you to join a good Lab, and usually it is through network + recommendations.
In Startup world, you can sit in your dorm room, without anyone believing in you and you can make it.
P.S. I am a research engineer, I worked in both places and that was my observations. There is no shortcuts, everything is hierarchical in academia.
I would challenge this point. There are few research labs in Singapore and middle east (UAE, Saudi Arabia) where money is not a problem. I have seen many researchers fly there to build research groups, but many of them leave after some time. You can see papers coming from these groups in top-tier conferences (NeurIPS, KDD, etc) every years, but these papers come from individuals, not groups. Money is one ingredient, you need fresh blood and students to work on new ideas. You need an ecosystem for research and industry to adopt and develop some of these ideas (e.g. Standford/Google, UCLA/DeepMind, UoT/Uber, MIT/Boston startups, etc)
I think every Msc student at a "no-name" german university has the chance to publish a paper at a top-tier conference. Student research assistant jobs are plenty and the Msc Thesis can be real-science. Every Msc. CS program here I know has a research-option so that instead of lecture you can do research. It's just hard to publish in those top-tier conferences and most research is more applied (and therefore more niche!) so its not easy to find an advisor for this. But in my experience even if the professor is working in a more applied setting you can push for a more basic-research, research is research. But you can do a phd here without publishing a paper first, so I don't think most Msc Students see it as a priority.
We come from different places. German universities are good in average. + MSc student have the chance to work as "working students" (20hr/week) at any company in Germany. https://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-un...
>> .. It's just hard to publish in those top-tier conferences
Hard is relative. You should also check the costs of publishing a paper or attending a conference for students from global south https://twitter.com/hadyelsahar/status/1374699909451030542
>> But you can do a phd here without publishing a paper first
I agree with that.
Hierarchy is everything in academia, especially in Germany. The only way to tenure is to have someone up there already who is willing to pull many strings for you.
A brand new research institute does none of these things for them. I don't see why a fresh PhD would choose this over either FAANG or a university.
> as I am currently acquiring some real estate that I want to put to good use in Germany
> space to work rent-free
> LLC-like structure
It sounds like the poster's head is not in the game at all. Like what instead of buying a literally useless building, you just pay people?
An academic institute, as I take it, is a sustainable organization that necessarily needs to think about funding and recruitment. It is not just a building or a community, but a host organization to support ongoing fund-seeking activities as well as providing the environment for academic interaction. In the US, these are often soft-money and so the senior researchers are writing proposals and bringing in funding to support themselves and the staff working under them. Overhead taken from such grants and contracts supports the host organization and can circle back to cover gaps in funding or new-business development efforts by the researchers. Other matching funds might be used to help bootstrap an institute (or a strategic expansion), but I think that self-sustainability is the typical operating mode.
Recruitment needs to consider the opportunity costs that your candidates are facing to join you. The "cheap labor" of grad students and postdocs are not available to anybody who wants to pay the same rate as a university. The candidate is expecting to benefit from the prestige, experience, and social network when they take such a position. They need to see a path where this period of sacrifice helps secure their future career. Regular research staff, already in their career, would expect fair compensation. A place with no reputation is higher risk, and probably needs higher compensation to attract the same talent. Also, I think academics are usually a bit risk-averse or otherwise have a different cost-benefit model compared to those who would rush into industry, startups, or entrepreneurial adventures.
I joined an institute in the US which was formed slightly before I was born, and to date I've experienced over 40 percent of its life and mine on the research staff. As I was told, it started as a small set of researchers who identified a problem area and potential funding source. They shopped around for a university willing to be their parent organization, to provide the administrative, HR, and legal support needed to take the money and pursue the research agenda. By the time I joined, almost 25 years later, the division that inherited the agenda of that first group was perhaps only one fifth or less of the total institute in terms staff or funding levels.
It's not impossible, but you do have to figure out ways to offset the risk and prestige hit.