I'll go out on a limb (especially since this is HN! run by YC!!): entrepreneurship is killing genius. In my lifetime I've witnessed the slow slide from blue sky research being rampant in corporate America around the time I was born (early '80s), to being found only in academia ('90s), to even academia being expected to turn a profit ('00s). My university even has a vice-Provost in charge of turning research into new businesses.
Not every good idea can make a profit. When you demand that all ideas do, you'll be missing out...
Don't be too fooled by marketing. Just because pure research doesn't come with all the glitter and flash of applied research doesn't mean it's not there. Remember: Every Macbook sold is an advertisement for the transistor, but there's no product that advertises Andrew Wiles, apart from a few math books. But that doesn't mean the genius isn't out there. He may be sitting at the table right next to you!
The secret to doing pure research in the modern era is to hype up the applied aspects for grant-hunting purposes. Developmental biologists and geneticists don't do "pure research": They do "cancer research" or "stem cell research aimed at curing Alzheimers". Even when someone who hasn't read certain paragraphs of the grant proposal would have a lot of trouble telling the difference. ("Are you sure you're not just having fun trying to make the fruit fly grow new eyes in embarrassing places?" "No, I'm studying the regulation of this very important oncogene, implicated in 36% of human cancers, that also happens to make fruit files see out of their feet." The beauty of it is: None of this is untrue. [1])
And a lot of that vice-Provost stuff is for show. Most professors couldn't actually make money in the market if it fell on their head. They're filing patents, collecting letters of collaboration from captains of industry, and talking big about "entrepreneurship" because it's cheap talk that impresses funding agencies. (A lot of funding applications have a section for listing such things.)
Finally, it's important to remember why there used to be a lot of industry money for "pure" research [2]: Monopolies. The public paid for that research via what amounted to a set of not-particularly-progressive sales taxes on phones (Bell Labs), photocopiers (Xerox PARC), and computer equipment (IBM labs). I don't have a study or anything, but it seems to me that soon after each of these big companies started seeing significant market competition, their pure research started to dry up, despite its world-class quality. It may be that pure research can't survive in a competitive market: The only way to sustain it is via tax-supported public funding. Hopefully with more intelligently-designed taxes than, say, a tax on all our phones.
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[1] Except that I made this oncogene up. ;) What I'm trying to say is: It's true that understanding cancer requires us to understand apparently unconnected facts about eye development in fruit flies. There's little about growth and development that doesn't have implications for cancer.
[2] It's also possible to argue that the industrially-funded "pure" research of old wasn't particularly pure. It was all intended to be applied or sold... just on a time scale more suited for a monopoly than a startup. Of course, it turned out that, even given a long-enough time, such a plan often doesn't work: For example, Xerox turned out to be well equipped to prototype the Alto, but was very ill equipped to manufacture and market it. It took a much younger and less mature company to do that.
On the topic of blue-sky research, I couldn't agree with you more. Both your assessment of the the how and the why is spot on. I think it's a shame, though, that the public was very gung-ho about doing away with the "tax" on telephones and computers, etc., but never considered the ramifications of reducing the ability of AT&T, IBM, etc., to do that basic research.
I also think it's worth noting that the longer the time-scale over which the research will become profitable, the greater the number unforeseen applications. A good example of this was Shannon's work at Bell Labs. Not only did it justify the eventual move toward digital transmission, but it also made possible a wide swath of genetics research. Now who could have foreseen that? and how much did those geneticists actually pay for the research?
As for the ability of researchers to game the system, and your assertion that the University entrepreneurship push is all for show, I'm less sure than you that "everything will be okay". I recently, as a graduate student, approached the office of sponsored research (OSR) for assistance in applying for NIH funding. The people in OSR didn't have a director and didn't know who was overseeing my department. When I finally did locate the correct person there, he was rather helpful, but I posed the question to him: There are many opportunities for both students and professors, but I had to find this one on my own. Why doesn't OSR promote more federal funding?
His response was that the school is actively pursuing funding through patent licensing and commercial partnerships, so the OSR has received less attention and has fewer resources at its disposal.
In other words, I don't doubt the ability of researchers to sell their basic science programs to federal funding agencies and the public as having practical applications, but I do worry about them loosing institutional support as institutions look more and more toward industry partnerships. After all, a congressperson might be fooled into believing that E. coli genetics research can help cure heart disease (a spin that I personally put on an application for AHA funding ;-), but Merck or Pfizer will be much less enthusiastic about the same spin if they don't have a lead molecule in 3-4 years time.
I upmodded you because I think your post is worthwhile but I think you're conflating entreprenurship with short-sighted greed.
Entrepreneurship and genius are just different aspects of the same thing: solving problems in new ways, more often than not by challenging the percieved rules of the game.
I realized only later that my statement needed an extra qualification: entrepreneurship is killing (non-entrepreneurship related) genius
Certainly Ron Popeil is some kind of genius...George Foreman too. But I'd challenge anyone to hand me a business model that could be formed around General Relativity! If we had demanded a business plan from Einstein before we let him continue working on his ideas, he'd probably have died a patent clerk.
Genius created the apple computer. Entrepreneurship brought it to the rest of us. There's probably about the same amount of genius as ever, there's just a lot more people hawking it these days.
Depends on how you're defining it, but attributing products to "genius" sounds awfully like a creationist fallacy. It's interesting that you should cite Apple; Woz's work on the Apple I and their current design process both seem exceptionally darwinian.
Woz just proves my point, though. He didn't worry about making money off the Apple I. That was all Jobs. Certainly, there are different kinds of genius. Jobs is a marketing genius. Woz is an engineering genius.
Tell me: How many post Apple I/II inventions of Woz are you familiar with? He certainly hasn't stopped inventing. He just doesn't worry about selling inventions any longer...
I'm going to have to disagree with that. It took surprising insight for the Woz to look at the same parts catalogs as everyone else and then (without even having the parts at first) do such extraordinary things with them. Many people had access to the parts, more experience, and the technical ability to do this earlier, they just didn't.
The iterative improvement that Apple uses to design and perfect products is somewhat darwinian but it lacks the random mutation and recombinative aspects that define evolution. I'd have to say (since the water has already been clouded by this new little corollary of Godwin's law) that it more nearly approximates intelligent design.
Not just Woz. Jobs did it too. Back then, and still today. If you think that the people who conceptualized and designed the iPod and iPhone aren't artists through-and-through, you've got another thing coming. The team works together, yeah, but you don't design beautiful things by committee.
Incidentally (to the OP), you always make multiple designs before you pick one. That's not loss of artistic process. I've got three drafts of a single chapter of the book I'm working on now. I've got something like 5 different possible melodies to fit a song I've been Garagebanding. That doesn't take away from the power of the individual when it comes to designing a product. (Considering how in-depth people have looked at Jony Ive's design process and inspiration, I find it sad that people still think Apple products are made through a generic idea-forming process, that the people barely matter in the creation process.
(Also, this author is not a particularly good one, and the fact that she's citing Tom Waits is not a good sign. Waits is a legendary practical jokester and story spinster, and all reports of his songwriting I've read say that he undergoes a very strict process when constructing his songs.)
Agreed. I wonder if there's a correlation between the rise of "If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" and the shift from Sonatra to Britney Spears. If the geniuses are entrepreneurs, who's left for the arts?
And the line between graduate school and consulting is getting way too thin. One of my GRAs required that I spend time on-site with the customer -- sorry, "corporate partner on the research grant."
Whew, that makes me feel better. I really like thinking about things, but I also really dislike the pressure that comes from thinking my ideas are only valid if there is a clear way to turn them into something practical.
Comments
I'll go out on a limb (especially since this is HN! run by YC!!): entrepreneurship is killing genius. In my lifetime I've witnessed the slow slide from blue sky research being rampant in corporate America around the time I was born (early '80s), to being found only in academia ('90s), to even academia being expected to turn a profit ('00s). My university even has a vice-Provost in charge of turning research into new businesses.
Not every good idea can make a profit. When you demand that all ideas do, you'll be missing out...
Don't be too fooled by marketing. Just because pure research doesn't come with all the glitter and flash of applied research doesn't mean it's not there. Remember: Every Macbook sold is an advertisement for the transistor, but there's no product that advertises Andrew Wiles, apart from a few math books. But that doesn't mean the genius isn't out there. He may be sitting at the table right next to you!
The secret to doing pure research in the modern era is to hype up the applied aspects for grant-hunting purposes. Developmental biologists and geneticists don't do "pure research": They do "cancer research" or "stem cell research aimed at curing Alzheimers". Even when someone who hasn't read certain paragraphs of the grant proposal would have a lot of trouble telling the difference. ("Are you sure you're not just having fun trying to make the fruit fly grow new eyes in embarrassing places?" "No, I'm studying the regulation of this very important oncogene, implicated in 36% of human cancers, that also happens to make fruit files see out of their feet." The beauty of it is: None of this is untrue. [1])
And a lot of that vice-Provost stuff is for show. Most professors couldn't actually make money in the market if it fell on their head. They're filing patents, collecting letters of collaboration from captains of industry, and talking big about "entrepreneurship" because it's cheap talk that impresses funding agencies. (A lot of funding applications have a section for listing such things.)
Finally, it's important to remember why there used to be a lot of industry money for "pure" research [2]: Monopolies. The public paid for that research via what amounted to a set of not-particularly-progressive sales taxes on phones (Bell Labs), photocopiers (Xerox PARC), and computer equipment (IBM labs). I don't have a study or anything, but it seems to me that soon after each of these big companies started seeing significant market competition, their pure research started to dry up, despite its world-class quality. It may be that pure research can't survive in a competitive market: The only way to sustain it is via tax-supported public funding. Hopefully with more intelligently-designed taxes than, say, a tax on all our phones.
---
[1] Except that I made this oncogene up. ;) What I'm trying to say is: It's true that understanding cancer requires us to understand apparently unconnected facts about eye development in fruit flies. There's little about growth and development that doesn't have implications for cancer.
[2] It's also possible to argue that the industrially-funded "pure" research of old wasn't particularly pure. It was all intended to be applied or sold... just on a time scale more suited for a monopoly than a startup. Of course, it turned out that, even given a long-enough time, such a plan often doesn't work: For example, Xerox turned out to be well equipped to prototype the Alto, but was very ill equipped to manufacture and market it. It took a much younger and less mature company to do that.
On the topic of blue-sky research, I couldn't agree with you more. Both your assessment of the the how and the why is spot on. I think it's a shame, though, that the public was very gung-ho about doing away with the "tax" on telephones and computers, etc., but never considered the ramifications of reducing the ability of AT&T, IBM, etc., to do that basic research.
I also think it's worth noting that the longer the time-scale over which the research will become profitable, the greater the number unforeseen applications. A good example of this was Shannon's work at Bell Labs. Not only did it justify the eventual move toward digital transmission, but it also made possible a wide swath of genetics research. Now who could have foreseen that? and how much did those geneticists actually pay for the research?
As for the ability of researchers to game the system, and your assertion that the University entrepreneurship push is all for show, I'm less sure than you that "everything will be okay". I recently, as a graduate student, approached the office of sponsored research (OSR) for assistance in applying for NIH funding. The people in OSR didn't have a director and didn't know who was overseeing my department. When I finally did locate the correct person there, he was rather helpful, but I posed the question to him: There are many opportunities for both students and professors, but I had to find this one on my own. Why doesn't OSR promote more federal funding?
His response was that the school is actively pursuing funding through patent licensing and commercial partnerships, so the OSR has received less attention and has fewer resources at its disposal.
In other words, I don't doubt the ability of researchers to sell their basic science programs to federal funding agencies and the public as having practical applications, but I do worry about them loosing institutional support as institutions look more and more toward industry partnerships. After all, a congressperson might be fooled into believing that E. coli genetics research can help cure heart disease (a spin that I personally put on an application for AHA funding ;-), but Merck or Pfizer will be much less enthusiastic about the same spin if they don't have a lead molecule in 3-4 years time.
entrepreneurship is killing genius
I upmodded you because I think your post is worthwhile but I think you're conflating entreprenurship with short-sighted greed.
Entrepreneurship and genius are just different aspects of the same thing: solving problems in new ways, more often than not by challenging the percieved rules of the game.
I realized only later that my statement needed an extra qualification: entrepreneurship is killing (non-entrepreneurship related) genius
Certainly Ron Popeil is some kind of genius...George Foreman too. But I'd challenge anyone to hand me a business model that could be formed around General Relativity! If we had demanded a business plan from Einstein before we let him continue working on his ideas, he'd probably have died a patent clerk.
I'll mention his refrigerator, and the atomb bomb was surely worth money.
Genius created the apple computer. Entrepreneurship brought it to the rest of us. There's probably about the same amount of genius as ever, there's just a lot more people hawking it these days.
Depends on how you're defining it, but attributing products to "genius" sounds awfully like a creationist fallacy. It's interesting that you should cite Apple; Woz's work on the Apple I and their current design process both seem exceptionally darwinian.
Woz just proves my point, though. He didn't worry about making money off the Apple I. That was all Jobs. Certainly, there are different kinds of genius. Jobs is a marketing genius. Woz is an engineering genius.
Tell me: How many post Apple I/II inventions of Woz are you familiar with? He certainly hasn't stopped inventing. He just doesn't worry about selling inventions any longer...
I'm going to have to disagree with that. It took surprising insight for the Woz to look at the same parts catalogs as everyone else and then (without even having the parts at first) do such extraordinary things with them. Many people had access to the parts, more experience, and the technical ability to do this earlier, they just didn't.
The iterative improvement that Apple uses to design and perfect products is somewhat darwinian but it lacks the random mutation and recombinative aspects that define evolution. I'd have to say (since the water has already been clouded by this new little corollary of Godwin's law) that it more nearly approximates intelligent design.
Not just Woz. Jobs did it too. Back then, and still today. If you think that the people who conceptualized and designed the iPod and iPhone aren't artists through-and-through, you've got another thing coming. The team works together, yeah, but you don't design beautiful things by committee.
Incidentally (to the OP), you always make multiple designs before you pick one. That's not loss of artistic process. I've got three drafts of a single chapter of the book I'm working on now. I've got something like 5 different possible melodies to fit a song I've been Garagebanding. That doesn't take away from the power of the individual when it comes to designing a product. (Considering how in-depth people have looked at Jony Ive's design process and inspiration, I find it sad that people still think Apple products are made through a generic idea-forming process, that the people barely matter in the creation process.
(Also, this author is not a particularly good one, and the fact that she's citing Tom Waits is not a good sign. Waits is a legendary practical jokester and story spinster, and all reports of his songwriting I've read say that he undergoes a very strict process when constructing his songs.)
Agreed. I wonder if there's a correlation between the rise of "If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" and the shift from Sonatra to Britney Spears. If the geniuses are entrepreneurs, who's left for the arts?
And the line between graduate school and consulting is getting way too thin. One of my GRAs required that I spend time on-site with the customer -- sorry, "corporate partner on the research grant."
Then again, entrepreneurship can fund great basic (or applied) research. Three examples spring to mind.
It doesn't seem to be entrepreneurship, but investing in projects instead of people.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=448722
"Not every good idea can make a profit." - - - - -
One might argue, that by definition a 'good idea' is one that is profitable for its pursuer.
Don't confuse the exchange of federal reserve notes for profit.
By your saying "When you demand that all ideas do, you'll be missing out..." I take it you are not confused in this regard.
Whew, that makes me feel better. I really like thinking about things, but I also really dislike the pressure that comes from thinking my ideas are only valid if there is a clear way to turn them into something practical.