Eureka: A New Era for Scientists and Engineers | Hacker News Reader

Eureka: A New Era for Scientists and Engineers

steveblank.com

40 pointsTristanKromer11 comments

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

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

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.

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.

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?

> 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.

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.

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.

I would expect that if the existing incentives were enough, it would already be happening.

If I have the choice between continuing to do research (work I find interesting) and trying to commercialize research I've already done (work I don't find interesting), then I'm going to need something more than a small chance at a big payout to convince me to do the non-research work. If running a startup were my actual goal, I'd have been at it for a couple of years already.

//If running a startup were my actual goal, I'd have been at it for a couple of years already. that makes you an academic. we(society) need our academics, but i think there are a lot of ideas that don't crossover into the entrepreneurship/product for the same reason(small chance at big payout). In that light, i would say this NSF initiative is good to push those on the wall into entrepreneurs.

Commercializing research is really hard. If Professor Smith discovers something potentially commercializable, then that's great for him. But Professor Smith isn't necessarily interested in doing that, or else he might want to but doesn't have the skills, or else he might want to and does have the skills, but can't afford to take time away from all his other duties, risking putting all his other research on hold for the sake of a commercialization project which might not go anywhere.

Then you've got the flipside -- some academics really want to commercialize something, but the stuff they're trying to commercialize is academically cool but not really serving a market need, so they spend years raising funds, finally get some, then spend the next few years burning through it in an ultimately-doomed attempt to get the market to buy something that it doesn't really want. (I've worked on projects like that...)

These kinds of projects to ease commercialization are a good idea, though of course they're nothing new.

So, its a form of Ycombinator for academia.

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