

Academics: Why it's faster, more lucrative, and fun to do startups - urlwolf
http://www.academicproductivity.com/2009/the-economist-academia-ranked-last-as-source-of-innovative-ideas-and-my-thoughts-on-startups-vs-grant-money/

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jderick
Startups don't do research. Some may try to commercialize research. Some
research labs may also try to commercialize research. But true research is not
something anyone would risk VC on. True research takes decades to see any ROI
and usually even then it is unclear exactly what the ROI is, making
traditional funding metrics useless. Here is an interesting book about Dupont,
IBM, and other research labs trying to quantify the output of their research
labs:

[http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=6200&page=6](http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=6200&page=6)

Bottom line: you have to invest in research because you know it will pay off.
But it is impossible to say exactly how or when it will pay off. The only kind
of institution that can support that kind of investment is government or large
(probably monopolistic) corporations.

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tudorachim
Not that the actual research part has paid off, but companies like Anybots
have been much more successful in their bipedal research efforts (see Dexter @
<http://anybots.com/abouttherobots.html>) than many academic labs, much less
other companies.

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zhyder
Anybots is probably not a traditional company in terms of the desire to make
money ("maximize shareholder value").

~~~
dantheman
I think this concept of a traditional company doesn't really exist, or is
fairly rare.

Most companies care about their employees, and care about their work. They
aren't trying to get every $ they can.

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scott_s
His timeline doesn't apply to Computer Science - and possibly other fields
like engineering, but I have much less experience with them. Because CS Ph.D.s
can get industry jobs, there's less need for them to do postdocs. Some do, but
it's still common for freshly minted Ph.D.s to get academic jobs. Of course,
getting those positions is still just as difficult as it is for the real
sciences, but there's not necessarily the 2-6 year delay.

I've given this topic some thought recently. Academia has it's problems, but
what I do like is that I can work on things that are interesting and useful,
but not necessarily profitable.

How can something be useful without being profitable? I do research in systems
and high performance. In theory, the software we create could be sold. Some
startups exist that do just that - Cilk Arts and RapidMind are two examples.
But I'm skeptical of their viability; companies that exists solely to sell
compilers rarely do well.

The kind of research I do is valuable to companies, but rarely as something to
sell on its own. Intel, for example, does research in programming models for
emerging architectures not because they want to sell that software, but
because they need it so programmers can use the processors they do sell.

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etal
I'm suspicious that the measure of "innovation" is the number of patents
filed, but I can't confirm that from the article. In academia, good ideas
rarely materialize into patents; they become papers, and the
relevance/influence/prestige is quantified in the number of other papers that
cite them.

Fortunately, many schools do support startups (financially, even) coming out
of their grad schools. I haven't noticed any discussion on the success of this
kind of support versus traditional VC, but it makes lots of sense for a grad
student to turn a thesis project into a startup immediately after graduation.

~~~
puzzle-out
There is a lot more happening on the enterprise/university front. My new
startup took pre-commercial funding from a fund set up between a consortium of
universities. I think this is a potential solution to the problems the blog
author identified, but for the funds to work properly, they need to be
administered and run by business people, not academics, and especially not
academic administrators.

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Tichy
Asking CEOs about sources of innovation seems rather biased. I think it is
rather difficult to tackle difficult problems of certain kinds in a startup.
Usually, you want to have an idea before you start that you can succeed.

Take the face recognition thing that Apple just announced. OK, that one came
from a corporation, but one with lots of money. I think for a startup it would
have been difficult to say "let's create a startup about face recognition in
photos" because until recently, no sufficiently good method for doing it was
known.

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anthony_barker
They should add competitors - lots of companies are simply first followers.

