3 ms·

Incubators, from what I have seen, do not work. At a fundamental level, the people we have producing basic research are disinterested in the application. It is

Incubators, from what I have seen, do not work. At a fundamental level, the people we have producing basic research are disinterested in the application. It is cultural (the exception is Manchester/Sheffield, the uni near me was doing NLP in the 60s, they recently tried to get professors into business...all of them were laughable, stuff that the sixth-formers are cooking up in the common room after too many Dibdabs). It cannot be a function of central govt (although the level of govt support for early-stage businesses is overwhelming). Ironically, the UK has actually tried this several times: one after WW2, then again in the 60/70s...didn't work either time. Again, the fundamental thing is: do you want to start a business? Or are you happy to sit in your university tithing the rest of the population? You see this in the private sector too, the default position of most execs is to maximise the options package and check out.

denton-scratch 4y ago
OK, so I don't really don't know what an incubator is; what I mean is that there should be a public institution or agency whose job is to remove the obstacles between invention and exploitation. I'm not talking about throwing money at start-ups at all. Such an agency could run on a shoestring, if it could influence other government agencies like the Patent Office, drafters of bills, committee members and so on. I don't care much for the idea that inventors must also be entrepreneurs, or be doomed to failure. Ideally, inventors and entrepreneurs partner-up; but entrepreneurs are pirates, and inventors partner-up at their peril. I guess that's the benefit of having both roles in the same person.
- skippyboxedhero 4y ago
  Yes, there are multiple institutions like this. The incubators were started by universities but they often get public funds. There is now ARPA (or whatever it is called). And there is now far more early-stage funding. The level of funding and support on offer is effectively unlimited. None of anything relating to the Patent Office or Parliament is relevant. You do need to throw money at it...that is how you convince academics not to do other things with their time. All of them have the option of just teaching, taking three months holiday a year, and collecting a decent salary. Right, that is the problem, you need both sides in one person. In the UK, there is no comprehensive education. When you are 15, you get put into maths/sciences or english/arts. So no-one who becomes an academic is interested in anything else at all (and PHd/assistant work is usually extremely underpaid, as in £17k/year...so almost everyone who has any other potential leaves before then). Where they have tried to bring someone else in, the academic will almost always assume that it is all a capitalist hoax/trick, and they are being swindled...it is an insurmountable psychological barrier for most people, so it does have to be both sides in one person (the UK is not like the US, you think academics in the US are left-wing, in the US they would be called communists...the culture of enterprise is non-existent). Again, the only places that I am aware of that have gotten over this are Manchester and Sheffield. Both second-tier institutions but they gathered academics who were able to understand the commercial application of inventions, and got large companies involved in working closely with these people so they could get on the right path (Manchester with graphene, Sheffield with an manufacturing process institute). You also see the same thing in Oxford/Cambridge but it is far more diffuse (and has far more people from outside the UK) and limited to pharma, some kinds of tech (i.e. ARM).

denton-scratch 4y ago

OK, so I don't really don't know what an incubator is; what I mean is that there should be a public institution or agency whose job is to remove the obstacles between invention and exploitation. I'm not talking about throwing money at start-ups at all. Such an agency could run on a shoestring, if it could influence other government agencies like the Patent Office, drafters of bills, committee members and so on. I don't care much for the idea that inventors must also be entrepreneurs, or be doomed to failure. Ideally, inventors and entrepreneurs partner-up; but entrepreneurs are pirates, and inventors partner-up at their peril. I guess that's the benefit of having both roles in the same person.

skippyboxedhero 4y ago
Yes, there are multiple institutions like this. The incubators were started by universities but they often get public funds. There is now ARPA (or whatever it is called). And there is now far more early-stage funding. The level of funding and support on offer is effectively unlimited. None of anything relating to the Patent Office or Parliament is relevant. You do need to throw money at it...that is how you convince academics not to do other things with their time. All of them have the option of just teaching, taking three months holiday a year, and collecting a decent salary. Right, that is the problem, you need both sides in one person. In the UK, there is no comprehensive education. When you are 15, you get put into maths/sciences or english/arts. So no-one who becomes an academic is interested in anything else at all (and PHd/assistant work is usually extremely underpaid, as in £17k/year...so almost everyone who has any other potential leaves before then). Where they have tried to bring someone else in, the academic will almost always assume that it is all a capitalist hoax/trick, and they are being swindled...it is an insurmountable psychological barrier for most people, so it does have to be both sides in one person (the UK is not like the US, you think academics in the US are left-wing, in the US they would be called communists...the culture of enterprise is non-existent). Again, the only places that I am aware of that have gotten over this are Manchester and Sheffield. Both second-tier institutions but they gathered academics who were able to understand the commercial application of inventions, and got large companies involved in working closely with these people so they could get on the right path (Manchester with graphene, Sheffield with an manufacturing process institute). You also see the same thing in Oxford/Cambridge but it is far more diffuse (and has far more people from outside the UK) and limited to pharma, some kinds of tech (i.e. ARM).