TechCrunch has an interesting guest post by Vivek Wadhwa The VC, The Professor and The Valley of Death which talks about unlocking the huge commercial potential in academic research (emphasis mine).
As someone who spent almost 5 years getting a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University, I am going to have to politely disagree with the implication he is drawing.In 2007, U.S. universities performed $48.8 billion of research and filed 17,589 U.S. patent applications. In that same year universities received back revenues for licensing and royalties on patents of less than $2 billion. Those revenues include ongoing royalties from all of the research licensed over the past 40 years. The implication is clear. An astonishing amount of promising research is left in the lab.
Let's look at what drives the typical Assistant Professor looking for tenure, and hence the typical graduate student. It is widely known that there is a sharp fall in "paper productivity" once an Assistant Professor lands that magical tenure and its associated unfirable-job-for-life, so if we understand the hungry Assistant Professor and the hungrier graduate student, we will have understood how the University research system works.
In the commercial world, revenues and profits are what drive innovation, at least in normal non-bubble times. We are highly motivated at Zoho to innovate, because that is the lifeblood of our business. Yeah, I agree, very crass commercial, capitalist motive. In the academic world, that crass commercial motive is substituted with a noble quest for grant money, papers and ultimately, tenure.
Once in a while some interesting work comes out of academic research, but by far the vast majority of work I have seen is of the "Minimum Publishable Unit" variety, as in "What is the smallest amount of stuff that will generate a publication?" An entire ecosystem exists, underwritten by taxpayer money, whose Darwinian imperative is publish or perish.
In engineering disciplines there is another fundamental, existential problem. One of the secrets they don't tell you until you enter graduate school is that most graduate students spend a lot of time looking to find "the problem" to solve. The quest is so desperate that you often invent fake problems to solve; one usually safe algorithm is to make trivial extensions to an existing paper, which itself made some trivial extension to some other trivial paper and cloth it all up in fancy mathematical language so the whole lot of it looks more impressive than it is. A lot of mathematics in engineering has become the equivalent of Sanskrit of the priestly class, designed as much to obfuscate as to elucidate.
Yet, in my entire time as an engineer in the commercial world, there never was a time where I was lacking in interesting problems to solve. At Zoho for example, there are numerous challenges around databases, distribution, web services, security and so on that you only realize exist when you start doing real stuff. This is an existential problem: you don't know what the real problems in engineering are until you do real stuff, or as in Paul Graham's words "Make What People Want".
Bottom line? I am pretty sure the vast majority of that $48 billion is not going to generate a return. In fact $2 billion out of $48 billion sounds about right as the ratio of really valuable academic work to all the fluff that gets published. Of course, that is a crass, commercial way of seeing it.
Go Sridhar, you crass commercialist. The same holds true in behavioral sciences and much of health care. What is funny is being called a "sell-out" for applying knowledge rather than locking it away. (Calling priestly level Sanskrit obfuscating is very generous in my experience.)
I am so glad that someone posted a rebuttal to the Valley of Death argument. While I agree there is unlocked potential in academic research, it is NOT because academics are "purists." In fact, these honest investigators are a dying breed in Universities as good ideas get shelved for more facile ones. Moreover, as you said, the current ecosystem rewards this kind of hasty science. Thus, we need to find a way to incentivize brilliance once again and not just rely on businesses to be creative.
This is so brilliant and accurate. If there were billions in opportunity in universities - believe me greedy VC's would have found it long ago.
Sridhar, I just tweeted about Bob's tweet. I know many academic researchers and I can say without hesitation that they aren't like the people you know. Nearly all really believe in making an impact by adding to the science. Yes, I know that there are always unethical people who are trying to beat the system and just get a degree. But fortunately, those that accept the low salaries and upside which academia offers are less likely to be like this. I have seen some amazing research at Duke and other universities which can help change the world when complete. I am sorry that you haven't. Vivek
Reposting: Sridhar, as I said in my tweets in response to Bob's tweets...It is sad that you have had such bad experiences and that you have friends who totally lack ethics and integrity. The academia I know isn't like this. The researchers I know really care and want to make an impact. The research I have seen can help change the world. I know there are unethical, incompetent people everywhere who try to beat the system. I am surprised that these people made it into Princeton. Vivek Wadhwa
"One of the secrets they don't tell you until you enter graduate school is that most graduate students spend a lot of time looking to find "the problem" to solve." --You hit the nail on the head there! :-) Searching for problems (in science) is hard as you have to sort of "prove" that your "new" problem and your "new" solution does not already exist and is superior. Google does not really help you here! The best academic researchers are the ones who can find these attractive and unique problems (that have not been solved before or have inadequate solutions) and can then come up with equally unique solutions that are peer-reviewed as "innovative" and actually "solve" this problem(s), oh! and they can do it more than once. Its not easy and its not a path for everyone. That's one big reason why not everyone with a PhD is in academia or cut out to be successful at it. Companies want results and profits. Industrial research and product groups are more likely to use applied research or creative twists on existing approaches to solve existing problems that a company faces (usually within strict time constraints) and will "guard" most innovations they come across/invent/rediscover or obfuscate proprietary details if they ever publish or disclose them. Very few companies have funds for blue-sky world-changing open-ended research projects. Alas, very few academics can claim to command that type of funding either, but for top academics, a few do get them (e.g, McArthur Fellowships). Academic research has tremendous hidden long term value. There is plenty of research with potential commercial value that is easy to overlook because it is published in lesser known conferences (or has less citations) and journals or is applicable in different disciplines all together or is just not indexed near the top on google! The real challenge (as @VWadhwa points out)is in helping good research find its value and application to business and to society (for free or not). Most top schools in the US (like Princeton) have good MBA schools nearby that have entrepreneurship challenges, mentoring programs, seedling programs and other resources, but there is much more that needs to be done.
Vivek, The issue is not really about ethics or integrity, it is about incentives. People play by the rules the system is set up for, and they get good at it. My post wasn't specifically about Princeton, it was about most of academia. Sridhar
I don't have any experience with the VC world, but I am currently a postdoc at a university and I can tell you that almost all the people I meet are honest people with a strong motivation to do good science. I think we can all agree that there is value to pure science. Part of why I stay in academics is that I have the freedom to pursue ideas that would not necessarily make me money in the future. Frequently when I start a project I have no idea how far it will go (many times its nowhere) but at least I will not go out of business in the process, and I may end up making a discovery that will change our understanding of the world. At a minimum, however, pure science gives everyone the framework for doing what we do, even if most of the time it is merely flushing out the subtleties of this framework.
I tend to agree with Sridhar again. No one is saying there aren't honest people in academia with pure motivations for doing good science. Indeed, most of the investigators there are probably driven by those values. The problem is that those qualities are not encouraged and rewarded properly and, hence, THAT is the real Valley of Death.
The absolute necessity and payoffs of waste: the other half of academia that you completely missed. Its very true that a lot of time is spent in graduate school to find 'the problem' and this leads to all kinds of perverse behavior including delta publications but it also rewards the rare person who make a truly original contribution and there is disproportionate payoff from these contributions. Some of these folks show their stripes even in graduate school, the greatest example is of course Claude Shannon who wrote the most important MS thesis in the world which revolutionized electrical engineering: the use of Boolean logic in analysis of circuits. These are the people that academia is looking for and the only way to find them is to accept the waste, accept the fact that 99/100 graduate students and asst professors will turn out run of the mill work which will be forgotten the minute it has been published.
hello tend to agree with Sridhar again
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