# Academic research is often just the concept half of creating a heuretic Is there a mapping between concept and implementation halves of heuretics and TRLs? [[Conception lives in the realm of TRL 1-3]] Since [[Academia is the game where you gain status by getting attention for new knowledge]] the work necessary to make the knowledge impactful is devalued. Those priorities are not necessarily ‘bad’ but it does require explicit acknowledgement that there is a lot more work necessary to make a full heuretic. [[The creation of a heuretic has two steps - conception and implementation]]. The focus on conception means that *academia does not create complete heuretics.* Incomplete heuretics make transferring the technology out of academia deceptively hard ([[Manage the Transfer not the Technology]].) Taking over an incomplete heuretic requires a lot more context. [[Context is important and underrated for knowledge transfer]]. The need for context may suggest that it’s important to have whomever is taking over involved in the process *during the conception.* Organizations that successfully do transfers seem to do this: * [[TandemLaunch]] talks to people in the lab before * [[Calvin Nguyen]]’s entrepreneur-in-lab idea is trying to embed the person who would do the transfer * Most successful companies that spin out of labs either have someone who did the research as a cofounder * Are there counterexamples to this? [[Are there examples of successful technology transfer out of a lab without close collaboration between someone in the lab and the external organization?]] A corollary to the increased need for context around a concept-only heuretic is that copying an incomplete heuretic is much harder than copying a complete one. Throwing things over the wall doesn’t work unless you have clean interfaces and [[only complete heuretics have clean interfaces]] and therefore the conception half of a heuretic can’t be thrown over a wall. This absence of clean interfaces may be a big reason why [[Just having the piece of literature doesn’t solve the problem]]! 🤯 Another corollary is that chaining together conception-only-heuretics will *absolutely require* talking to people in order to get enough context and that it *can’t* be done automatically by reading papers. ([[Roadmapping could be thought of as backwards-chaining together a series of conception-only heuretics]]) ### Related * [[Technology Readiness and the Valley of Death]] - specifically the “ilities" <!-- #evergreen --> [Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Academic+research+is+often+just+the+concept+half+of+creating+a+heuretic) [Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Academic+research+is+often+just+the+concept+half+of+creating+a+heuretic)