Traversing between Academia and Industry
Two systems for solving problems
Although there are meaningful differences between professional lives in the academy and industry, the good news is learning to exist in one of those spaces will help you enter and thrive in the other. However, as you might expect there are many things that won’t help at all once you cross the wall and venture into new lands. One way that I think is helpful for seeing the overlap is viewing both business and the academy as systems for solving problems collaboratively. Part of the reason it is difficult to succeed in either domain is that you can never be certain about how people relate to the available problems. Often no one knows which problems to solve or what problems the people they need to know about have.
In the academy there are communities of researchers all working toward advancing the field. In many of these communities, there is an upper echelon of researchers who steer the community (for better or worse) in specific directions. This kind of steering is not done directly but is performed by their ability to influence the field. This manifests as certain people receiving more praise, funding, citations, etc (often coinciding with merit but sometimes not). This means that in order to understand what problems people care about in a particular academic discipline you have to know a bit more than the material itself. It’s a prerequisite to have a deep understanding of the technical matter that the domain deals with. But once you get there, you can’t expect people to care about the first problem in a novel direction that pops into your head (you could get lucky and immediately happen upon something the whole domain cares about, it could happen, I’m saying don’t count on that sequence of events). You need to take into account the general trends in your field and in particular what the folks at the top seem to care about. Of course, following this advice leads to a new set of problems. One of which is the fact that, in any system, it’s non-trivial to know who is at the top. A whole crop of problems appear when we try to discerned the bidding of others which are at a distance to us.
On the other hand, you can embark on your own direction if you are willing to subsist on small number of citations and not necessarily being the at the center of where the funding comes from. If that sounds appealing to you, to live a life free from caring about what is happening elsewhere in your discipline, then by all means go for it. I myself was quite surprised to find that this path is not what I wanted. Although I painted myself as someone who wanted to do their own thing, I found out through trial and error that I do care about engaging with knowledge systems in a way that resonates with the complex cultural structures that govern them. That’s not to say I don’t think the whole system is wild and often contrary to what I find most interesting, but having had a few experiences where what I work on receives direct feedback in a way that allows me to see where the whole group is headed was very rewarding. So rewarding that I’m often willing for forgo the most interesting thing that occurs to me and focus on something more aligned with what the group is interested in. Your mileage with the strategy will vary!
A set of similar dynamics occur in business (of course there are important differences). Naturally, the feedback that many care about in business can be measured in dollars. That signal is very interesting and if you happen upon a solution to lots of people problems, it might be that you can turn some of those people into customers. That is, They are willing to pay you for your solution to the problem. I say this with one qualification, you can not make everyone happy with your solution. It’s hard to find the right group of people once you have a solution even when it is a good one. In other words, a major challenge that new businesses face is aligning they solution with the expectations of customers (or changing minds so taht customers are created).
At the end of the day, most of the way one succeeds in business or academia is in understanding who cares about what problems and then having the knowledge to solve that problem. There are strategies to be learned from each side that can help you on the other. And simultaneously, there are trends on one side that will not help you or even harm your success in the other. I make no claim that I have even a sliver of understanding and certainly what I have thought about represents only a tiny slice of how these two giant systems have similarity and interact. Yet I’m very thankful for my time spent in graduate school since it has offered me a perspective on the business problems I face which I don’t think I would have without that experience. I’ve also known excellent researchers who embarked into industry first only realize their place was in the academy. While I don’t know if they would agree or not, I do think their experience in business first provided valuable experience in their academic career.
You may notice this post is much shorter than the others in this section. It’s true! I’m trying out shorter form posts which focus on a single idea. These shorter posts are written with the intention that busy folks can consume them in 5 minutes or less (give or take).