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Ask HN: Is doing research harmful in an idea harmful for a startup?
I am finishing college, and I've been bouncing around ideas for a startup. In this case, I have some ideas pertaining to a solution for automatically generating websites - ideas which came on the heels of a course in automata theory.
It is possible that the way I want to go about doing this might possibly be of value to researchers in this field. Since I'm at a university and I have the opportunity to share ideas with professors, my question is this: should I even bring it up? I think it would be good for me to be able to flesh out this idea by working on it as a research project (if professors think it is worthwhile), and by the end I might possibly be able to publish. Hey, I'm at a university - the research opportunity and resources are there, why squander them?
But when I start the business, I don't want to have to worry about intellectual property. There are plenty of examples of things which have started out in academia, and then the researchers went commercial, and unexpected intellectual property royalty hacks cropped up.
So what I don't know is: should I even bring this up with a professor? Once I explain my idea during office hours, will that advisor want indefinite credit or profit? Actually, if an adviser helps, they would probably deserve long-term credit, but I would want to go about it in the right way.
Or should I just work on this independently, and don't even worry about trying to churn out another paper?
By "should I..." I'm asking "In your experience, do you have any thoughts or insights into this decision process?"
Thoughts?
- notaddicted 17y agoYour university has a policy on this. Different universities, different policies, so look into it.
- Mz 17y agoMy initial thought is that sometimes ideas cannot be developed without the shelter of an environment like a university and one person shows typically don't accomplish much. So I think some ideas that later went commercial and then found themselves with this conflict might not have ever gotten developed at all if the originators had tried to keep it all to themselves. So one question you might ask yourself is: If I try to go it alone and keep it secret, will I get anything done? If you think you can, that might be the way to go. If you get the feeling that would kill the project, then you need another solution -- whether this path or another path -- that involves working with other people.
- Novash 17y agoI am not a lawyer, so by no means consider this a legal advice, but I seem tempted to remember that the whole PageRank script that made Google be Google was actually their thesis at College, wasn't it? My memory fails now, but I am pretty sure they got it published somewhere before creating Google since their first plans were to sell the idea to some big company, and only after being turned down by everyone was that they decided to do it themselves.