Research as Entrepreneurism

The title of a new book caught my eye: Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution, written by one of the founders of the navigation platform, Waze. The book argues that entrepreneurial activities succeed when focused on solving a problem that is important to many, many people. Too often, perhaps, the entrepreneur has in mind a wonderful solution (e.g., an attractive application protocol) but the problem being solved is not important enough for people to change their current behavior. Loving the problem, the author argues, is a prerequisite for the perseverance necessary for solutions to important problems. The first understanding of the problem is often found deficient. Indeed, early rounds of failure are required to deepen insight into the mechanisms that produce the problem.

How similar is this to the life of the academic scholar!

Of course, academic scholarship often uses a different nomenclature than that of entrepreneurism. It is often attempting to “answer a question” rather than “solve a problem.” It is seeking deeper insight into how the natural and human-built worlds operate. It sometimes seeks richer expression of human creativity or understanding the impact of human creations. In that sense, the “problem” it is attempting to solve is human ignorance in some domain. Its potential “customers” are all of humankind. Further, its measure of success is not the amount of money produced by the scholar but the how human understanding is advanced by the scholar. In some sense, the “problem” is how to increase human flourishing, attainable by richer knowledge.

Another important difference between the work of academics and entrepreneurs is continuity of focus. Entrepreneurs seeking capital creation generally depend on investors that require positive gains in months or years, not decades. The existence of universities and their tenured faculty permits a perseverance of purpose that is required for the invention of new knowledge as well as the reassembly of existing knowledge. Working on the same family of questions over many years guarantees many failures (but they make the successes sweeter).

One of the joys of the podcast “Faculty in Research” is learning how our faculty colleagues describe the central motivation for their research. It is common for them to describe an early-life observation that identified a problem that became a life-long passion. Without this passion few scholars could persevere in their quest over years. Michael Turner, a scientist, is quoted in a NYTimes piece: “You ask a question, and often it turns out to be the wrong question, but you have to ask a question just to find out it’s the wrong one. If it is, you ask a new one.” Our questions are often a piece of an unsolved problem, a component of our current framework of understanding. Often the dead-ended question merely refocuses our attention on the larger problem. Repeatedly do this, year after year, deep devotion. There is little doubt that they “love their problem.”