More Things I learn about industry vs academia

Let's continue where we left off last time in our conversation about "Industry vs. Academia".

Industry - vs Academia (in robotics) [part 2]

Continuing from where we left last time in Industry - vs Academia (in robotics)[part 1], the two other topics I want to discuss are customer and growth.

customer

• Industry

  • As mentioned in the previous part, with the idea of "the goal of a business is to provide value to their customers", it is natural for people in industry to pay attention to their customers. Understanding customers helps companies to then work backwards and find solutions that can solve their customers' problems. Some companies advertise this concept of being "customer-obsessed", e.g., Amazon. What I've observed under this culture is that people try to evaluate their work from the customers' standpoint, therefore, de-risking the mismatch between expected and actual market response.

  • Being customer-obsessed, on the other hand, is allowing the customers to partially decide the direction of the company. Every customer has their own concerns, and every concern is related to yet another layer of factors. It is not hard to see that a company thinking for their customers has multiple layers of factors to consider.

• Academia

  • Most researchers take the scientific community or, even broadly, society, as their customer, i.e., the group of people that they want to provide value to. The biggest difference compared to industry is that their customers do not need to exchange, i.e., pay, for the value they receive. Since the customers are not paying, academia instead relies on sponsors to get economic support to run the business, i.e., the research lab.

  • This three-party dynamic introduces some challenges to keep the system efficient. For example, a project that has the potential to impact the scientific community greatly may not be funded due to an overall lack of budget, and a project that is funded may end up failing to deliver value to the customer as promised in the proposal accepted by the sponsors.

  • However, as long as the sponsors grant freedom, having a loose connection with the customers allows researchers to have more freedom in terms of the direction that the lab wants to pursue.

  • The other group of researchers simply treat their sponsors as customers, e.g., research labs that collaborate with industrial sponsors. Their operation is therefore similar to the business-customer relationship in industry.

growth (note that this “growth” focus more on the scalability.)

• Industry: the sky is the limit. This is relatively straightforward. The size of a company is somewhat limited by the size of the customer group. However, there is no limitation on how a company can develop new customers by expanding the type of products or services they provide. Therefore, the growth of the company is theoretically unlimited (until they have made every single person on earth their customer).

• Academia: the size of a research lab is somewhat limited by school-level regulations. Even building size and campus size will at some point become a constraint to the growth of a lab. Note that this is not the same as the growth of personal impact. Professors can continue to grow their impact in the scientific community or society as they do more research, even though the size of their research lab has saturated for a long time.

Again, my goal here is to describe two different environments. I hope you find something interesting. :)

Industry - Writing the “What“ (important for academia too!)

(At some point I should create a new topic, “Writing.” )

This is inspired by a conversation with a colleague. He was asked to write a short summary about his work in the past month and talk about his plans for the near future. He then showed me a paragraph that he wrote. His writing is clear. However, I immediately spotted a problem - there were too many technical details that focused on the method, i.e., the “how I do it”. Back when I was a student, I often thought that the problem I'm trying to solve was obvious, and the juicy parts were the methods that I used to solve the problem. In some sense, this is true, therefore, most research paper also focus more on the “how”. However, people in industry have a different focus and expectation when it comes to writing.

• Things that are obvious to the writer are often not obvious to the reader. This is true in general, both in industry and in academia. However, more people in industry tend to ask the writer directly for help to understand, instead of doing research on their own for the questions they have. Therefore, this idea is more recognized in industry.

• Writing gives a chance for the readers to help you. In industry, most readers are looking to offer help. Often, they can provide good feedback or guidance because they have more visibility of the bigger picture or they have more experience with the process or topic. Therefore, focusing on the “what” and “why” (instead of “how”) enables most people to provide more valuable feedback.

• People in industry want to trust you with the “how.” This is the biggest difference compared to being a student. As a student, we are in the process of learning all three steps, i.e., the what, why, and how. In addition, the exam system naturally puts more weight on “how”; we are given exam problem sets (the “what” and the “why”) and we are asked to show the “how.” However, once working in industry, your colleagues and your manager actually expect you to use your skills and take care of the “how.” This is why people are not expecting too many technical details.

This is one of the interesting things that I found about writing. I will share more in the future!