Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by cjbenedikt 869 days ago
We licensed IP from a Uni. It was so basic that we had to do all the development work losing our investors in the process.
2 comments

That's kind of expected! A relevant perspective from looking at this is the Technological Readiness Level concept (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_readiness_level) - you'd expect university research to bring new ideas up to TRL4 or perhaps TRL5, but going from that to TRL8-9 so that it's ready for buyers is the development-heavy part of R&D that should be done in the industry (or perhaps in academia if funded by industry, as research grants wouldn't/shouldn't), that's what "commercializing research" means.
Yes and no. Most universities are not equipped/funded to go from TRL2 to TRL 4 or 5. Many great ideas end up in drawers because of that. That's when startups step in but they need to be funded as well. However, at least they aim for commercialization - academia not so much.
Most things realy worth persuing would already have been cherry picked and poached by spin-offs created by the faculty involved.

As a 3rd party you are basically browsing the leftovers.