The Researcher vs. the Entrepreneur

High-tech startup companies often recruit technologists with PhD training into R&D positions, where the recruits and to continue down a highly technical and innovative career path. This often leads to win-win scenarios where the company receives a boost in its product offerings and enhances its intellectual properties, while the individual leverages the research and technical expertise she has built and is intellectually and financially rewarded by the challenging technical problems she helps solve. In this process, the individual is also likely to develop an entrepreneurial mindset, potentially leading the next wave of technical innovations in the IT industry.

However, for the researcher to become a successful entrepreneur, she has to adapt herself out of the researcher role that she used to play. I see the following key differences between a researcher and an entrepreneur.

1. Key inner drives
While both types of people can be motivated by external factors such as money and fame, their key inner drives are different. The researcher is mainly driven by her intellectual curiosity. Through reading, thinking and communicating, she constantly seeks to gain new insights into her research domains. In contrast, the entrepreneur is mainly driven by creating a real-world impact, which is often manifested in improving people's lives in concrete and measurable ways.

2. Problem solving methodology

When facing challenging technical problems, the researcher's primary focus is to innovate. She may study the literature to understand whether there is an existing solution that works well. If so, she has to either tweak the problem or pick a different one to tackle, as the original problem is no longer worth her time, where the worthiness is primarily measured by whether the result is publishable. In contrast, the entrepreneur cannot choose to tweak or discard the problem, as solving the problem is often an integral component in the end-to-end product solution that she is building. The entrepreneur will reuse the existing solution on a conceptual or implementation level if it is legally and economically feasible, as this allows her to maximize her productivity by solving the problem in the shortest amount of time with the highest quality. That being said, there are often plenty of challenging or open technical problems that urge the entrepreneur to innovate throughout her journey in building a high-tech startup.

3. Degree of completeness

The Researcher often takes the first step in addressing an open problem, and then moves on to other problems. She may also choose to tackle 3 to 5 problems or projects at once. In comparison, the entrepreneur has to build end-to-end solutions in the problems she tackles, and needs to stay sharply focused on the particular solution she is building. This is a trade-off between breadth and depth.

Conclusions

While the above differences are significant, they are character and preference oriented. In other aspects of their work such as skill sets and mind sets, the researcher and the entrepreneur have a large overlapping. First, both possess a strong technical background, understand the state-of-the-art and are able to advance it through innovations. Second, both work in a collaborative setting, where the key contributions are made by partnering with others or stepping on the shoulder of the giants. Last but not least, both need to be intuitive, relying on gut-feelings at the initial, exploratory stage of their journey; when the journey progresses into more concrete territories and the details of their work are to be fleshed out, both need to take on an analytical mindset, making data-driven decisions.

Are you a researcher or an entrepreneur? Do you see more similarity or differences between them?