

Eureka: A New Era for Scientists and Engineers - TristanKromer
http://steveblank.com/2011/07/28/eureka-a-new-era-for-scientists-and-engineers/

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richcollins
FYI, Steve will be discussing this program at the San Francisco Lean Startup
Circle:

<http://www.meetup.com/Lean-Startup-Circle/events/27379661/>

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techcofounder
Kudos Steve! This is a wonderful thing for entrepreneurship and innovation in
general. The NSF is the largest "VC" in the world. Their "fund" is $8B per
year! And they give out 10,000 grants to the smartest scientists in the
country. Minus overhead, that's an average of 400-500K per grant! I can't wait
to see what type of companies this program produces.

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pixcavator
Q What is I-Corps?

A NSF Innovation Corps (I-Corps) is a public–private partnership that provides
grants to determine the technology disposition of concepts developed by
_previously or currently funded NSF grantees_.

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wccrawford
In other words, they spend money to review the success of projects they've
funded. Makes sense to me. How else will you improve your process?

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beefman
> a program to take the most promising research projects in American
> university laboratories and turn them into startups

I don't think any additional incentives are needed for this.

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wccrawford
I disagree. I think there are a lot of promising projects that don't get
enough attention because there isn't enough focus on using the research. It's
all ivory-tower stuff. There's something magical that happens when you try to
turn pure research into actual product: More knowledge!

It's rarely a straightforward thing to do, and I can understand academics not
wanting to tackle it. But it really does matter.

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beefman
When it's possible to put scientific results to practical use, the researchers
themselves can start a company. My wife worked for a firm founded this way
(Coverity) and a friend of mine was an early employee at another (Audience).
As well, existing firms and entrepreneurs can and do use published results all
the time. The rewards are high if the results are valuable. The problem, as
hard as it may be to believe, is that most published results have no direct
practical use. This comic rings very true

<http://xkcd.com/664/>

The NIH is finding this out with their recent push to turn NIH-funded results
into drugs. Collins is already backpedaling from earlier this year (you'd
think he would have learned this lesson after being beaten to the genome by an
organization of 1/10th the means).

At Apple, I worked closely with battery engineers. Lots and lots of battery
research is going on -- we hear about nano-virus-assembled anodes all the
time. But approximately none of it is useful to battery engineers. Batteries
must have energy density, power density, good recharge time, and high cycle
life. Press releases about gee-whiz battery chemistries typically quote one or
two of these figures, but never all four. That's because all of them have a
huge problem with one or more of these things, and no horizon for fixing them.
And the instant a breakthrough is made -- like graphite anodes at Bell labs in
the early '80s -- everyone will be working on it. There are approximately no
'forgotten breakthroughs' in human society. The incentives provided by
contributing to wikipedia are enough to disclose almost everything known.

The whole point of funding basic research is to discover such things, which
are too important to be proprietary. Markets are very good at the details that
are appropriate to keep under one roof.

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abhinav
So, its a form of Ycombinator for academia.

