Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by gyulai 1773 days ago
It might be worth considering a change of framing: Instead of helping researchers find a company to commercialize their research (solution looking for a problem), give companies a way to find researchers who can help them solve their problems (problem looking for a solution).
5 comments

Great insight! More than a change of framing it's also something we're beginning to explore and productize. At first, it was easy for us to view the tens of thousands of unlicensed university technologies as a problem, but now it seems to be more of a solution to the problem of corporate R&D not knowing who exactly they should be getting in touch with. Push vs pull if you will.
Yes! I'm so glad you commented this. We actually ended up focusing on universities due to the pandemic last year and having to stay hyper focused. But, we're in process of preparing to launch our company need --> scientific expertise tool. This is a much larger market and we can't wait to kick things off.
AcademicLabs.com is known to be the leader in this space with a sophisticated platform, used by ao most big pharma. Some other players as well. Best to carve out your own unique niche like you're doing now and then you can see how to grow from there.
I missed this previously. AcademicLabs has an impressive platform! We're carving our niche and learning every day. The biggest thing for us is helping scientific breakthroughs get to market, faster. Cheers to what is ahead!
I agree. Phd students are often not particularly wealthy and may have to pay for this service out of their own money. Companies looking for specific expertise however are likely to have funds for it, and be more than willing to pay for a good service.
Great point. The good news is we're offering our tool for free to PhD students right now as we work to get universities to cover sitewide licenses for faculty and students.
My university at least had a commercialization office. I imagine that they are the ones paying for it in this model.
Yes - the majority of our current customers include the tech transfer, corporate relations and VP of Research offices.