

Ask HN: Is doing research harmful in an idea harmful for a startup? - memset

I am finishing college, and I've been bouncing around ideas for a startup. In this case, I have some ideas pertaining to a solution for automatically generating websites - ideas which came on the heels of a course in automata theory.<p>It is possible that the way I want to go about doing this might possibly be of value to researchers in this field. Since I'm at a university and I have the opportunity to share ideas with professors, my question is this: should I even bring it up? I think it would be good for me to be able to flesh out this idea by working on it as a research project (if professors think it is worthwhile), and by the end I might possibly be able to publish. Hey, I'm at a university - the research opportunity and resources are there, why squander them?<p>But when I start the business, I don't want to have to worry about intellectual property. There are plenty of examples of things which have started out in academia, and then the researchers went commercial, and unexpected intellectual property royalty hacks cropped up.<p>So what I don't know is: should I even bring this up with a professor? Once I explain my idea during office hours, will that advisor want indefinite credit or profit? Actually, if an adviser helps, they would probably deserve long-term credit, but I would want to go about it in the right way.<p>Or should I just work on this independently, and don't even worry about trying to churn out another paper?<p>By "should I..." I'm asking "In your experience, do you have any thoughts or insights into this decision process?"<p>Thoughts?
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Novash
I am not a lawyer, so by no means consider this a legal advice, but I seem
tempted to remember that the whole PageRank script that made Google be Google
was actually their thesis at College, wasn't it? My memory fails now, but I am
pretty sure they got it published somewhere before creating Google since their
first plans were to sell the idea to some big company, and only after being
turned down by everyone was that they decided to do it themselves.

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notaddicted
Your university has a policy on this. Different universities, different
policies, so look into it.

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Mz
My initial thought is that sometimes ideas cannot be developed without the
shelter of an environment like a university and one person shows typically
don't accomplish much. So I think some ideas that later went commercial and
then found themselves with this conflict might not have ever gotten developed
at all if the originators had tried to keep it all to themselves. So one
question you might ask yourself is: If I try to go it alone and keep it
secret, will I get _anything_ done? If you think you can, that might be the
way to go. If you get the feeling that would kill the project, then you need
another solution -- whether this path or another path -- that involves working
with other people.

