The VC, The Professor, And The Valley Of Death | Hacker News Reader

The VC, The Professor, And The Valley Of Death

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16 pointsjmonegro11 comments

University researchers don’t know how to commercialize their discoveries

I realise I am going to be kindling for the next HN bonfire for saying this... but...

... some of us don't want to commercialize our discoveries, and in fact we are in academia partly because we find the commercial world so unattractive.

Now please stop throwing things at me and go back to your start-ups.

That's fine - no one has a problem with that.

The problem is that some people do, and it's impossible to get the tech out. The vast majority of R1 universities have moronic - utterly moronic - tech transfer offices. I can speak to this better than most as someone who did VC and had to deal with researches fighting against moronic tech transfer officers that insisted on onerous terms, insanely high royalty rates, and copious paperwork to get tech out.

A few years back, my advisor and I went through the process of applying for a patent for some of our reseach, via our university's IP office. They would only pay for the provisional patent -- we would have to come up with any funding for a full patent (like $20k) and they would still own the patent. That doesn't give much incentive for researchers to push for patenting and commercialization.

We just dropped the idea, given that it would take a lot more work to develop the idea to the stage that a VC would be interested.

What he said about funding is generally right -- at least in the CS world, most research projects are only implemented far enough to get a paper published. The funding (and tenure system) doesn't really reward any further development.

The one exception that I've seen is the NSF SBIR/STTR program: they can give you some angel-level money to get the project beyond a research prototype (and do not take any equity!).

edit: I've also heard that the funding situation is better in Europe, but I don't know any details.

Your story is very strange, the usual way the university patent system works is the following.

You ask them to apply for a patent. They either apply for it (eating the $20k themselves) or else they send you a letter declining any interest. If you get the "decline" letter, that means they gave up any interest or ownership in your invention.

My experience was in the University of California system. I certainly would have preferred that they either declined it immediately or paid for the full application. It may be that they don't have much experience in software. Also, software patents are less valuable than those in other areas, like biotech. We didn't really care too much about the patent but wanted the IP ownership to be clear.

I'm not surprised. Our tech transfer office says that the vast majority of offices actually lose money applying for patents. The ones which are profitable make almost all of their profits on only a few patents.

Digging through and commercializing research in whatever field you may be interested in is one thing. But it would seem like you would be missing out on many more opportunities in unrelated fields. Many advancements in tech/science in general were born from research in other fields. How do you cross pollinate those ideas with other fields on a large scale?

how much of that 48 billion worth of research is worth anything in the real world?

A lot of that research is useless. Take biology for example, they might spend 5 million, trying to find out why a certain tree has slightly yellower leafs. Useful for their field? Maybe. But there is really no feasible way for them to monetize it.

Funny you should use that example. I remember mentioning to someone years ago that biologists had discovered that certain trees send chemical signals to each other through the soil- especially when they're traumatized.

He scoffed and laughed and said "Can you believe the stupid stuff people research? All this stuff with absolutely no application..."

I was frankly a little stunned. I was thinking that it could affect crop growth, depending on how you harvest the last crop, how if there was a trauma mechanism there might be a reverse mechanism that could cause revolutions in biological growth, etc. etc. etc. I couldn't believe he didn't see the potential I saw.

Which brings me to my point: saying "...no feasible way for them to monetize it" is, in my opinion, a symptom of lack of imagination. While it's not all monetize-able, I believe with the author that 48B of research represents a goldmine of ideas for someone with the proper eye for opportunity and business acumen.

A lot of that research is useless

How many major commercial breakthroughs started off as a "useless" little experiment in a lab somewhere over the last couple of centuries or so?

The road from scientific breakthrough to commercial viability is long and winding. Don't decry something as worthless just because you cannot find an immediate use for it. Who knows, in 60 years time a synthetic derivative of that specific yellowing agent in those leaves might be the cornerstone in some significant commercial product or process.

Often it isn't the main goal of the research that's monetizable. Instead there's an assumed body of knowledge that is "well-known" and "solved" - but in fact there are only a few people in the world that truly understand it, and it could make a large impact in the industry.

If you can get deep enough into a field to sense those ideas in the air (and this is much less work than you need to publish original papers yourself), you might find a goldmine.

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