If you work for a company, the bottom line pretty much comes down to market opportunity. Economic sustainability requires you to ask yourself what you can make that is of value, where “value” is defined by what people are willing to pay for.
But when you do university research, the question may be rather different. Often you ask yourself what has future value. That is, what will be of value to people ten or twenty years from now?
But then there is a second question: Of all the things you can work on that have future value, which of them have no current value? In other words, what might be valuable to people in ten or twenty years, but isn’t something people are ready to pay for now.
And those are often the things you should work on, because they aren’t being worked on by Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Sony, Amazon, Adobe or Apple. Those companies generally cannot afford to spend their time working on things that won’t be able to pay for themselves for another twenty years.
So in some sense, while corporations are in the business of looking for where the market is, academic researchers are often in the business of looking for where the market isn’t. And when we find an exciting antimarket opportunity — something that is likely to be a hot new product in about twenty years or so — we know we’ve come to the right place.
I guess it make more sense to work on an antimarket project that may be useful 5 years from now instead of whooping 20 years …
That’s perfectly logical. Yet in my experience, large companies are often quite active in areas that will be of commercial interest in 5 years.
P(You spending time) << P(google spending time)
P(You doing research) << P(google research rezults)