So many young, smart and incredibly talented research scientists I meet at MIT and similar universities want to have meaningful and profound impact in society.
Be it through the invention of a new contraption to capture CO2 from the atmosphere, reducing the effects of uncontrolled CO2 emissions, to discovering a new mechanism that nudges human cells to fight disease, these people are eager to get out into the real world and apply what they’ve learned.
They face a major hurdle: Preparing a technology for use is extremely difficult because the final configuration must match the needs of those who will use it. And finding out what configuration works has little to do with the academic work that led to the innovation.
Scientists come to realize they need to become the foremost expert about someone else’s problem (user, buyer, payer, or any combination of such roles) and feel overwhelmed and ill prepared to do this. It’s one thing to develop a technology that captures C02 directly from the atmosphere better than anything out there; it’s another to get that into a product package that someone will choose to purchase, install, and maintain in the real world, with real economic considerations.
The information gap between existing real-world experience and the scientist’s intuition and insight is wide and deep. The good news is that it’s easy to close by doing what most people dread: Primary Customer Discovery research. Getting out of the office, of your comfort zone, and talking to people to learn about them and their problems is the core idea behind Customer Discovery.
So, when you tell yourself that you want to build a company, probably it’s worth rephrasing this the question to: what problem do I care about the most? This will compel you to do Discovery with gusto!