Markets Reward Relevance, Not Elegance: The Research Startup Trap
Something I keep noticing when researchers try to build startups.
Many research startups don’t fail because the technology is weak. In fact, the technology is often quite impressive.
Where things usually break down is somewhere else. The team never really understood the problem they were trying to solve, or the customer who actually experiences that problem.
In research labs we are trained to think in a certain sequence.
First the technology.
Then possible applications.
And only later, the market.
But startups rarely work that way.
It is often the other way around.
You start with a real problem someone is struggling with, understand how they deal with it, and only then think about what kind of solution (and technology) might help.
For researchers, this shift is hard.
Not because they are not capable.
But because it is very easy to fall in love with the elegance of the technology.
Markets don’t reward elegance.
They reward relevance.
I have seen very smart teams spend years building something technically brilliant, only to realise that:
the problem was not important enough
or the customer segment was wrong
or the workflow they imagined does not really exist
On the other hand, when teams start by deeply understanding the customer, the technology often becomes even better. Because now it is solving a very specific and real problem.
I wonder if this is something we need to start exploring much earlier in research journeys.
Would be interesting to know how others see this, especially people who have worked closely with research teams trying to build startups.
