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Ask HN: Researchers: What practical research hasn't been commercialized?
It's my understanding that many fields have practical, useful research results that never get brought to market. Most often, it's because researchers lack the time and interest to starting a business, or the researcher's university owns patents and entrepreneurs don't want to deal with the licensing process, or simply that no one outside the field is even aware of the practical applications of the research.
So I ask all you HN researchers: What results are you aware of that can solve problems and help people, but haven't yet been commercialized?
- l5870uoo9y 8y agoMy impression is that cooperations these days facilitates a lot of practical research to attain an eventual patent and reap the benefits of the scientists' achievements. It isn't research, but I was at a party the other day and this women who works at a record company specialising in classical music said that an classical music app with high quality recordings didn't exist.
- thebigspacefuck 8y agoTIDAL/Spotify have classical music, though I'm not sure if FLAC/320Kbps is what she meant by high quality recordings.
- briankelly 8y agoI think a lot of it needs to be remastered for digital, she might mean that.
- currymj 8y agoA company called Grammofy tried to do this, it was good, but then they ran out of money. They’re back in some capacity but now tied to Spotify.
- ArtWomb 8y agoHypersonic and supersonic civilian transport. SpaceX published a first render of what parabolic arcs through low-earth orbit would look like. With estimated one-way arrival time under an hour. YC's own Boom Aerospace is set to announce first flight of its experimental XB-1 aircraft sometime next year. But it is just the beginning. Latent consumer demand could equal 100M+ passengers per annum. The technology is here today. It's simply not evenly distributed yet ;)
- Cobord 8y agoSupersonic civilian transport was here in the 70's. It also wasn't evenly distributed then either. Hypersonic okay, now you have my attention.
- maxander 8y agoDo you really think there are 100M people on the planet willing and able to pay for the absurd fuel cost this would require, just to shave off a few hours heading to a holiday or business meeting? There’s a reason that present day jets are so slow, and it’s not technological, it’s economical.
- namibj 8y agoYou are confusing "unique visitors" with "clicks", to borrow from Website-speak. I hope this makes sense now. Also, the reason the jets are so slow is that supersonic flight is illegal for civilan aircraft over much developed land. There are ways to greatly reduce the noise though, and for subsonic aircraft there are also ways to fly fast but very silent if optimized for this. We have the tech, the oscillations have to be eliminated in e.g. rocket engines, and we are talking about conditions that we can simulate due to the temperature and pressure being in much more comfortable ranges.
- ljw1001 8y agoI saw the best minds of my generation wasted making hyper-toys for the hyper-rich.
- Maro 8y agoMillion dollar question :)
- notadoc 8y agoPhage therapy is the most glaringly obvious to me, particularly as antibiotic resistance increases while the pipeline of new drugs is nearly nonexistent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_therapy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_therapy
- ReedJessen 8y agoThoughts on why this hasn't been commercialized?
- notadoc 8y agoDifficult to patent. Likely substantial costs to build and maintain a very large phage library. Often each particular patient needs individualized treatment which is a laborious process. I'm sure there are regulatory hurdles in the USA too.
- jeffreyrogers 8y agoHard to get regulatory approval and concerns that phages can't be patented so pharmaceutical can't guarantee a monopoly. Plus, the existing way works, so not much incentive to replace it with something speculative. Sort of like why you don't rewrite an existing codebase in C in some other language.
- notadoc 8y ago> Plus, the existing way works, so not much incentive to replace it with something speculative. Except the existing way is quickly no longer working, hence antibiotic resistance. Also, it's not speculative, phage therapy works.
- sndean 8y agoHaving talked to a researcher that's used phage therapy on a soldier to combat sepsis, it obviously works, but the hurdle is getting the FDA/others to allow injection of live virus into people. (Edit: that was his quick response to "why is it not being used?") Somewhat similar: I had to get several injections of the subunit anthrax vaccine that essentially doesn't work (even though live attenuated anthrax is far more effective) because some regulatory committee doesn't like the idea of live (or even whole cell) vaccines.
- noelwelsh 8y agoJust a note that not all research needs to lead to a product to be useful. Changing how an existing process is done is sufficient. A library for a programming language might be another result.
- andbberger 8y agoThis is one of those... those who know don't talk and those who talk don't know situations... You're going to have to put your money where your mouth is!
- mygo 8y agohow do you figure that? there are many researchers whose innovative and practical solutions do not get funded. why would people keep quiet about under-funded research?
- robius 8y agoThere are a lot of reasons, some of which are cultural. With the concept of failure being shameful, those people bury that experience and try completely different ones to find success they can feel comfortable with sharing. Not all societies view a shortcoming or failure as a learning opportunity and stepping stone to success.
- andbberger 8y agoBecause it's a valuable idea that I know about and you don't? BTW feel free to send me actual money, I'm sitting on plenty and I can only work on one at a time.
- mygo 8y agothat’s your mentality. it’s not everybody’s. I’m not interested in sending you money for your ideas, thanks. There’s all kinds of people. If there is a big enough problem to be addressed then there exists not only information hoarders/squatters like yourself, but also others who would be willing to elaborate to just move something forward and try to get their problem solved.
- andbberger 8y agoIf it was academia we were discussing, then yes share all the things. But OP is asking about things which can be commercialized. Sadly science funding in the US is an absolute shitshow and science costs money so... I think you should consider this from the position of a researcher with no funding sitting on valuable ideas. Commercializing that idea can fund other research they want to do. So even from the perspective of wanting science to be free and the common heritage of mankind, a researcher can do more science by capitalizing on a valuable idea. It's kinda shitty, but science doesn't take place in a vacuum, researchers have to eat. I get where you're coming at, but I just don't think it's realistic. You can't just ignore incentives.
- analogwzrd 8y agoI couldn't give you a list of examples off the top of my head, but I do know that people are aware of this problem and one of the more prominent solutions is to attach a start-up accelerator to the university. The example I know of is the Innovation Deport in Birmingham, AL (my hometown) being attached to the University of Alabama at Birmingham. The university does a lot of medical research and from what I hear, the Innovation Depot is trying to establish itself as the go-to place for professors to take their patents and provide business/engineering/manufacturing expertise. https://innovationdepot.org/ https://innovationdepot.org/
- mbowcutt 8y agoMany universities (if not most) already have technology transfer offices for this purpose. What is the difference between the Innovation Depot and [1] this department at UAB? [1] https://www.uab.edu/research/innovation/ https://www.uab.edu/research/innovation/
- analogwzrd 8y agoI'm not exactly sure where they draw the lines...but the "Accelerate" picture on the website for that department at UAB is a picture of the Innovation Depot. That department might just be the university side of the accelerator.
- Fomite 8y agoAfter a brief reading, it's important to note that two paths for faculty: 1) Get someone else to commercialize your research (tech transfer often does this) and 2) Start a business around your research Have very different paths and consequences.
- wenc 8y agoSemi-on topic: people with blue-sky ideas are often asked "if the idea was so good, why hasn't anyone commercialized/done this before?" which often inhibits further inquiry. But the fact is, an idea's current feasibility may be a function of its present constraints. Opportunities open up when constraints change [1]. This is why it can be useful to revisit old ideas and test them against the current environment. [1] "Objectives and constraints", https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2018/06/26/objectives-and-constraints/ https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2018/06/26/objectives-and-con...
- overcast 8y agoIf you think you've got a great idea, rest assured a thousand other people on this planet have the same idea. The difference is when one of them actually does it. Few do.
- danieltillett 8y agoNot always. Once you get narrow enough in the required technical background knowledge you can reach a point where there are only a few people in the world that have it. At this point it won’t be surprising that only one person thought of this idea.
- Scarblac 8y agoA thousand people doing this on the planet seems far too few, actually. We could use some more.
- wenc 8y agoI think your point about execution is correct -- few people actually develop their ideas into something tangible. But I'm not sure that it is an inevitable fact that most people will end up having the same ideas. Someone once said that in humongous countries like China and India, it is statistically inevitable they have thought of most of the things the rest of the world have thought of. But why hasn't China come up with thoughts that German philosophers have come up with, or with specific ideas that have come out of the west? I think it's because there wasn't a focus on the things that mattered to Europeans at the time. Culture and environment matters, and dictates the ideas we are capable of having. Large populations are not made up of uncorrelated, independent individuals. Most of the those individuals have highly correlated thoughts, mostly driven by the culture at large.
- colordrops 8y agoI'd wager that anything that is not profitable is not commercialized. For instance, finding some household substance has the same efficacy of a billion dollar pharmaceutical.
- TomMckenny 8y agoThe "Rapid Ramen Cooker" took till 2010 to be commercialized: it's a plastic tray.
- kypro 8y agoThe commercialisation of water is an even better example. You can sell anything if you market it right.
- fifnir 8y agoI don't know how far research has been so far, but I can see a few Nobel prizes of medicine (and lots of money) in the gut microbiome field
- robius 8y agoThere are many, just ask any unhappy scientists. Funding goes to popularity, not new research. This is even true at DARPA where they ignore new technology because it doesn't fit some preconceived notion or don't have a framework to evaluate it. Case in point for XAI, explainable artificial intelligence. The algorithms we use today give us black box models we can't interpret directly. So instead of fixing the algorithms, they focus on modeling the models and "guessing" which ones come close enough via simpler more intuitive stacks of models. Guesses upon guesses. There has been research in new algorithms that generate open models where the weights make sense and are editable. There is one company working on this, but it's not nearly enough. There's another set of research that has managed to convert black box models into open ones, giving full transparency. Then there's asynchronous circuits research which do not require a clock. These can reduce power usage and boost efficiency on low power devices. Not much going on here. There's one group building a RISC5 architecture with these, based on 30+ year old research with the inventor who still has not seen his life's work commercialized. Then there's various types of imaging and tracking with signals we use every day, such as BT, Wi-Fi and Cellular among others, and being able to locate devices or people. You can find several universities doing this, none have made it commercially.
- brookhaven_dude 8y agoCan you provide more references on XAI and converting current black-box models into more open ones?
- robius 8y agoGoogle finds XAI easily: https://www.darpa.mil/program/explainable-artificial-intelligence https://www.darpa.mil/program/explainable-artificial-intelli... As for the conversions, I think these guys are working on a service or with early customers. https://optimizingmind.com https://optimizingmind.com
- 3pt14159 8y agoI actually think that's a pretty hot topic right now. Tons of people are working on commercializing it. Heck, a couple years ago I even did a contract with a major government where I helped them fix their recommender and it was built with explainability in mind because explainability allows politicians to understand the risk and into install human-review safeguards.
- walrus01 8y agoIt's theoretically possible to build really small nuclear reactors for electrical power generation (such as for a pacific island that currently uses heavy fuel oil and diesel). I recall a pilot project that was trying to get off the ground to power a fly-in town in Alaska. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galena_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galena_Nuclear_Power_Plant Regulatory, nuclear material proliferation and safety concerns have prevented anyone from doing so up until now.
- tensor 8y agoAlmost any state-of-the-art computer science paper can be incorporated into a commercialized product. Entire companies are often built around a single fancy new index method or the like. The trick is in the execution and application. What problem are you going to solve? Are you able to build up the surrounding "boring" bits necessary to productize something?
- myf01d 8y agoNetwork on Chip
- tux_warrior 8y agoSolar cars for sure! The technology is pretty much there, but some special interest groups (OPEC, etc) are lobbying to keep it away from citizens, just so their financial exploitation can continue for some more time.
- qznc 8y agoApply static code analysis to apps for guarantees like "This app access your addressbook but never sends it to the internet". Some of my ex-collegues were working on this: https://pp.ipd.kit.edu/publication.php?id=jodroid2015atps https://pp.ipd.kit.edu/publication.php?id=jodroid2015atps Turn the research prototype into a practical tool. Hope to get acquihired by Google or Apple for their app store.
- gabcoh 8y agoThis seems like an incredibly useful and important tool. However, I think ideally a tool like this should be open source and free. edit: it seems like this groups work is open sourced actually https://pp.ipd.kit.edu/projects/joana/ https://pp.ipd.kit.edu/projects/joana/
- qznc 8y agoJoana is an open source Eclipse plugin for information flow control. Afaik the most precise one which still scales reasonably well. The core technology is not the thing to commercialize. The valuable thing is to be an independent third party which provides the guarantees. It is about image and prestige. The hard question imho: Are such guarantees valuable enough? Do end users care enough that it is worth it?
- Daishiman 8y agoIsn't this just a variant of taint analysis?
- reasonattlm 8y agoIf you run through the ~15 years of my blog, Fight Aging!, you'll find scores of promising lines of work that never made it much further than the initial reports. Medical science has a huge chasm of death between research and commercialization. It is comparatively rare for failure to proceed to be a matter of technical failure. Other causes are, I think, more common. Part of this is that researchers don't know how to launch it, and most are not entrepreneurial. Part of it is that many technology transfer groups are like dogs in a manger, toads squatting atop things they'll never put any effort into helping along, and whose job in life is to make it slow, expensive, and hard to deal with their IP. Part of it is that funds, VCs, and to some degree entrepreneurs sit around waiting for something to be handed to them, nicely packaged. I think most of the fault is with the funds and the incubators. They have the money to craft a solution, to make a landing pad for scientist outreach, to give them a beacon to aim at. They can reach back into the research community to a much greater extend. They can build BDCs that increase the ratio of projects:entrepreneurs that can be tackled profitably. But very little of this actually happens. My company, Repair Biotechnologies, has found two immensely promising technologies for human rejuvenation that have been in the first case dropped on the floor at the chasm of death, never carried forward, and in the second case died because the institutions involved couldn't convince their funding sources to back the incredible potential of the work. This happens. Many institutional sources of funding don't want to see biotech barnstorming, don't want to see imaginative, radical new directions. They shut it down. All of this combines to form a dysfunctional environment in which knowledgable entrepreneurs can pick up truly revolutionary projects, but there really needs to be institutional change that only bigger organizations and wallets can bring to bear.
- overlords 8y agoIs there some comprehensive source of information on these. Downloadable dataset of research, like the patent database that is downloadable.
- qznc 8y agoI heard seasonal thermal energy storage is underrated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasonal_thermal_energy_storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasonal_thermal_energy_storag... Solar power is mostly available in summer, but heating is mostly necessary in the winter. How do you store the energy for half a year? Apparently a big water tank underground is a great solution. It is also boring, non-sexy, and cheap. Thus there is little interest to commercialize it.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 8y agoDoesn't sound cheap for a single family unit, but maybe many of them.
- namibj 8y agoDepends on the cost of digging.
- danieltillett 8y agoHaven’t you just described a geothermal heat pump [0]. These are not exactly new. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_heat_pump https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_heat_pump
- azhenley 8y agoSeveral of my tool designs for developers have not been applied to products yet (while some have). See my pub list: http://austinhenley.com/publications.html http://austinhenley.com/publications.html Let me know what you would like to fund :)
- arrmn 8y agoCan you link some products that have your research as a basis?
- Fomite 8y agoI know for my own work, which I think has commercial potential, I go back and forth as to whether or not the juice is worth the squeeze as far as commercialization is concerned.
- stealthcat 8y agoThe capitalists lobby pretty badly to suppress incoming disruptive technologies that could take their market share. Energy, agriculture, medicine, etc.
- kapauldo 8y agoSolar activated nanoparticles for heating water.
- ankurdhama 8y agoI think one general point that we all need to understand is that even though a practical research is amazing and have good potential, in the real world, it will have to work with the existing and very complex ecosystem. This task of bringing a new tech into an existing ecosystem is really really difficult and depends on so many factors that are outside of control for the people who developed the new tech.
- DoreenMichele 8y agoIn the US, this is one of the purposes of the National Labs and they probably all have easily googled programs. For example: https://www.ornl.gov/connect-with-ornl/for-industry/partnerships/ https://www.ornl.gov/connect-with-ornl/for-industry/partners... http://lanl.gov/business/business-opportunities/index.php http://lanl.gov/business/business-opportunities/index.php Edit: list of labs https://science.energy.gov/laboratories/ https://science.energy.gov/laboratories/ https://www.usa.gov/federal-agencies/national-laboratories https://www.usa.gov/federal-agencies/national-laboratories
- ljw1001 8y agoThere are many advances in diagnostic medicine that aren't pursued because the cost of testing many people outweighs (economically) the benefits of treating the few positive cases who would be found. Finding a way to change that calculation could open many paths to treatment.
- alimw 8y agoNot all research is designed for commercial exploitation! For example some ideas that are both practical and useful can only be implemented by regulators or government agencies. In this arena good research may fail to find adoption for any of a vast number of stupid reasons.
- rapjr9 8y agoUniversities patent lots of practical research that has yet to be commercialized. Here are some patents I've helped file that I know are not yet commercialized: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.htm&r=0&p=1&f=S&l=50&Query=%28an%2Fthe-trustees-of-dartmouth-college%29+AND+in%2Fpeterson&d=PTXT http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=H...