MIT manual for turning research into startups

>The new playbook arrives amid growing national interest in revitalizing the United States’ innovation pipeline — a challenge underscored by the fact that just a fraction of academic patents ever reach commercialization.

Wait until they find out that only a fraction of academic progress gets patented, and that only a fraction of useful technology progress was traditionally made in the academic environment to begin with.

>MIT’s venture studio embeds full-time entrepreneurial scientists — called venture builders — inside research labs. These builders work shoulder-to-shoulder with faculty and graduate students to scout promising technologies, validate market opportunities, and co-create new ventures.

They really are on the right track here to make the most of their facilities, this is one of the opportunities I could not help but notice was becoming more outstanding over a decade ago.

Now sixty years ago things were still pretty traditional and most technology in history was still created by non-PhDs. There had just never been that many PhDs concentrated in industrial situations like there were in academics. Probably because there were just not that many PhDs.

Industrial research was still flourishing up until the Nixon Recession when it was the first thing to go, and never return. Even a non-degreed experimentalist could build a department where the building was filled with people whose unifying goal was to invent things that make money. Facilities big enough or with unique niches would be fortunate to have a single PhD in a key position, often more for prestige than as a direct innovator.

In a very complimentary way, universities traditionally had their buildings filled with people who had an abundance of PhDs, but without the requirement for anybody to innovate in a money-making way. It was not really needed when there was still commercial research being done externally on an industrial scale before all the cutbacks. Recessions hurt universities too, and they had belt-tightening of the '80's as well, turning the screws on financial caution and savings which were essential for survival. But moving the prospect of commercializing their research even more out of reach at the same time. That's just the way it works, some people will say that an idea on its own is worthless, but it's not really true. Some of the things at MIT could be worth a lot more than average, plus when there's a proof-of-concept too that's a little more than a basic idea. None of this is a dime-a-dozen but the deployment is what costs a fortune and takes a long time.

After all that if you've got an institution where you can effectively come up with a million-dollar idea a week, and hammer out a few POCs per year, it could very well be one that made it through all kinds of turmoil, and you're lucky you're even there. Academic or industrial, public or private. It takes more than all the right moves, it requires good fortune too. The cost of deployment of one of these million-dollar ideas, to actually reach the million-dollar level in real dollars, is what there's usually no resources for. Until that landscape becomes more favorable, wouldn't it be more sensible for the most efficient innovators to come up with enough new undeployed progress to form the foundation of a dozen or more whole companies over the same time period? While the first million is not within reach anyway.

Which could really be worth a whole lot more than $1 million if you do the math.