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Ask HN: Researchers: What practical research hasn't been commercialized?

by hazard on 7/17/18, 4:16 PM with 78 comments

It's my understanding that many fields have practical, useful research results that never get brought to market. Most often, it's because researchers lack the time and interest to starting a business, or the researcher's university owns patents and entrepreneurs don't want to deal with the licensing process, or simply that no one outside the field is even aware of the practical applications of the research.

So I ask all you HN researchers: What results are you aware of that can solve problems and help people, but haven't yet been commercialized?

  • by robius on 7/17/18, 4:57 PM

    There are many, just ask any unhappy scientists.

    Funding goes to popularity, not new research. This is even true at DARPA where they ignore new technology because it doesn't fit some preconceived notion or don't have a framework to evaluate it.

    Case in point for XAI, explainable artificial intelligence. The algorithms we use today give us black box models we can't interpret directly. So instead of fixing the algorithms, they focus on modeling the models and "guessing" which ones come close enough via simpler more intuitive stacks of models. Guesses upon guesses.

    There has been research in new algorithms that generate open models where the weights make sense and are editable. There is one company working on this, but it's not nearly enough.

    There's another set of research that has managed to convert black box models into open ones, giving full transparency.

    Then there's asynchronous circuits research which do not require a clock. These can reduce power usage and boost efficiency on low power devices. Not much going on here.

    There's one group building a RISC5 architecture with these, based on 30+ year old research with the inventor who still has not seen his life's work commercialized.

    Then there's various types of imaging and tracking with signals we use every day, such as BT, Wi-Fi and Cellular among others, and being able to locate devices or people. You can find several universities doing this, none have made it commercially.

  • by wenc on 7/17/18, 4:39 PM

    Semi-on topic: people with blue-sky ideas are often asked "if the idea was so good, why hasn't anyone commercialized/done this before?" which often inhibits further inquiry.

    But the fact is, an idea's current feasibility may be a function of its present constraints. Opportunities open up when constraints change [1]. This is why it can be useful to revisit old ideas and test them against the current environment.

    [1] "Objectives and constraints", https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2018/06/26/objectives-and-con...

  • by andbberger on 7/17/18, 4:35 PM

    This is one of those... those who know don't talk and those who talk don't know situations...

    You're going to have to put your money where your mouth is!

  • by reasonattlm on 7/17/18, 6:06 PM

    If you run through the ~15 years of my blog, Fight Aging!, you'll find scores of promising lines of work that never made it much further than the initial reports. Medical science has a huge chasm of death between research and commercialization. It is comparatively rare for failure to proceed to be a matter of technical failure. Other causes are, I think, more common.

    Part of this is that researchers don't know how to launch it, and most are not entrepreneurial. Part of it is that many technology transfer groups are like dogs in a manger, toads squatting atop things they'll never put any effort into helping along, and whose job in life is to make it slow, expensive, and hard to deal with their IP. Part of it is that funds, VCs, and to some degree entrepreneurs sit around waiting for something to be handed to them, nicely packaged.

    I think most of the fault is with the funds and the incubators. They have the money to craft a solution, to make a landing pad for scientist outreach, to give them a beacon to aim at. They can reach back into the research community to a much greater extend. They can build BDCs that increase the ratio of projects:entrepreneurs that can be tackled profitably. But very little of this actually happens.

    My company, Repair Biotechnologies, has found two immensely promising technologies for human rejuvenation that have been in the first case dropped on the floor at the chasm of death, never carried forward, and in the second case died because the institutions involved couldn't convince their funding sources to back the incredible potential of the work. This happens. Many institutional sources of funding don't want to see biotech barnstorming, don't want to see imaginative, radical new directions. They shut it down.

    All of this combines to form a dysfunctional environment in which knowledgable entrepreneurs can pick up truly revolutionary projects, but there really needs to be institutional change that only bigger organizations and wallets can bring to bear.

  • by qznc on 7/17/18, 5:57 PM

    Apply static code analysis to apps for guarantees like "This app access your addressbook but never sends it to the internet".

    Some of my ex-collegues were working on this: https://pp.ipd.kit.edu/publication.php?id=jodroid2015atps

    Turn the research prototype into a practical tool. Hope to get acquihired by Google or Apple for their app store.

  • by qznc on 7/17/18, 6:08 PM

    I heard seasonal thermal energy storage is underrated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasonal_thermal_energy_storag...

    Solar power is mostly available in summer, but heating is mostly necessary in the winter. How do you store the energy for half a year? Apparently a big water tank underground is a great solution. It is also boring, non-sexy, and cheap. Thus there is little interest to commercialize it.

  • by walrus01 on 7/17/18, 5:02 PM

    It's theoretically possible to build really small nuclear reactors for electrical power generation (such as for a pacific island that currently uses heavy fuel oil and diesel). I recall a pilot project that was trying to get off the ground to power a fly-in town in Alaska.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galena_Nuclear_Power_Plant

    Regulatory, nuclear material proliferation and safety concerns have prevented anyone from doing so up until now.

  • by notadoc on 7/17/18, 4:30 PM

    Phage therapy is the most glaringly obvious to me, particularly as antibiotic resistance increases while the pipeline of new drugs is nearly nonexistent.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_therapy

  • by colordrops on 7/17/18, 4:49 PM

    I'd wager that anything that is not profitable is not commercialized. For instance, finding some household substance has the same efficacy of a billion dollar pharmaceutical.

  • by analogwzrd on 7/17/18, 4:38 PM

    I couldn't give you a list of examples off the top of my head, but I do know that people are aware of this problem and one of the more prominent solutions is to attach a start-up accelerator to the university.

    The example I know of is the Innovation Deport in Birmingham, AL (my hometown) being attached to the University of Alabama at Birmingham. The university does a lot of medical research and from what I hear, the Innovation Depot is trying to establish itself as the go-to place for professors to take their patents and provide business/engineering/manufacturing expertise.

    https://innovationdepot.org/

  • by ArtWomb on 7/17/18, 5:14 PM

    Hypersonic and supersonic civilian transport. SpaceX published a first render of what parabolic arcs through low-earth orbit would look like. With estimated one-way arrival time under an hour. YC's own Boom Aerospace is set to announce first flight of its experimental XB-1 aircraft sometime next year. But it is just the beginning. Latent consumer demand could equal 100M+ passengers per annum. The technology is here today. It's simply not evenly distributed yet ;)

  • by Maro on 7/17/18, 4:23 PM

    Million dollar question :)

  • by tensor on 7/17/18, 5:11 PM

    Almost any state-of-the-art computer science paper can be incorporated into a commercialized product. Entire companies are often built around a single fancy new index method or the like.

    The trick is in the execution and application. What problem are you going to solve? Are you able to build up the surrounding "boring" bits necessary to productize something?

  • by DoreenMichele on 7/18/18, 6:19 AM

  • by azhenley on 7/17/18, 6:31 PM

    Several of my tool designs for developers have not been applied to products yet (while some have).

    See my pub list: http://austinhenley.com/publications.html

    Let me know what you would like to fund :)

  • by rapjr9 on 7/19/18, 5:39 PM

    Universities patent lots of practical research that has yet to be commercialized. Here are some patents I've helped file that I know are not yet commercialized:

    http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=H...

  • by noelwelsh on 7/17/18, 4:31 PM

    Just a note that not all research needs to lead to a product to be useful. Changing how an existing process is done is sufficient. A library for a programming language might be another result.

  • by ankurdhama on 7/18/18, 6:12 AM

    I think one general point that we all need to understand is that even though a practical research is amazing and have good potential, in the real world, it will have to work with the existing and very complex ecosystem. This task of bringing a new tech into an existing ecosystem is really really difficult and depends on so many factors that are outside of control for the people who developed the new tech.

  • by fifnir on 7/17/18, 4:53 PM

    I don't know how far research has been so far, but I can see a few Nobel prizes of medicine (and lots of money) in the gut microbiome field

  • by l5870uoo9y on 7/17/18, 4:40 PM

    My impression is that cooperations these days facilitates a lot of practical research to attain an eventual patent and reap the benefits of the scientists' achievements.

    It isn't research, but I was at a party the other day and this women who works at a record company specialising in classical music said that an classical music app with high quality recordings didn't exist.

  • by alimw on 7/18/18, 5:05 PM

    Not all research is designed for commercial exploitation! For example some ideas that are both practical and useful can only be implemented by regulators or government agencies. In this arena good research may fail to find adoption for any of a vast number of stupid reasons.

  • by ljw1001 on 7/18/18, 12:38 PM

    There are many advances in diagnostic medicine that aren't pursued because the cost of testing many people outweighs (economically) the benefits of treating the few positive cases who would be found.

    Finding a way to change that calculation could open many paths to treatment.

  • by Fomite on 7/17/18, 7:03 PM

    I know for my own work, which I think has commercial potential, I go back and forth as to whether or not the juice is worth the squeeze as far as commercialization is concerned.

  • by myf01d on 7/17/18, 5:22 PM

    Network on Chip

  • by stealthcat on 7/17/18, 10:31 PM

    The capitalists lobby pretty badly to suppress incoming disruptive technologies that could take their market share. Energy, agriculture, medicine, etc.