# What do I mean by pre-commercial research? Like so many, this is a [[Nebulous]] term, so you can find plenty of “aha” corner cases. But I think by pre-commercial research I mean work where it’s not yet clear how the work contributes to an economical product. What counts as pre-commercial research probably varies based on economic conditions and domains. Maybe pre-commercial research is actually just “research,” distinct from “development.” Maybe this is just navel gazing but I think it’s important to point to work that has some amount of open-endedness and has high uncertainty This is very tied to [[When should an idea that smells like research be a startup?]]