Hope YCR works. Suggestion: Get a board of advisors who have had a lot of experience managing research, and let them occasionally advise you on opportuniti

Hope YCR works. Suggestion: Get a board of advisors who have had a lot of experience managing research, and let them occasionally advise you on opportunities and pit falls. I got an applied math Ph.D., just to improve the good career I already had going in applied math and computing, had no intention of being a professor, but for a while, having to do with my wife in her long illness, I was a professor. The biggest problem I had in research was just getting the mathematical word processing done. The typing was much more difficult than the research! I published some papers in some good journals and never had a paper rejected or needing significant revision. I could have done a lot more in research, but I was really interested just in making money. For research in academics, that is, the STEM fields, I have long had a suggestion: Borrow from research in medicine! Why, how, in what respects? Sure: Research in medicine also has a clinical side, and a lot of the research, applied research intended to connect with applications, very much needs the clinical side. E.g., instead of all the seminars being professors and students presenting solutions still looking for applications, have about half the seminars with people from the real world outside academics present problems looking for solutions. Have professors with their students attack such problems. That way could get some problems to work on, simple, medium, and really difficult and important, e.g., P versus NP just from applications of optimization to, say, vehicle scheduling or communications network design. E.g., I was working on something applied and rediscovered k-D trees -- a few years earlier and I would have been the inventor of k-D trees. And there are other examples of starting with a real problem from the real world and getting good results for that problem, getting a good research problem, and getting some good research progress. Besides, such research already has one application and, thus, is much more likely to have two or many more than two. Have an expectation that a professor pursuing applications is a professional and needs to practice their profession. And the students need to be there also as apprentices. Also, have codes of ethics, standards on how revenue is to be distributed, and professional peer review of the clinical practice. For more, it would help if the venture capital community were ready, willing, and able to evaluate original research intended as the crucial core of startups.