This is so silly. You don't have a startup idea until you have a product that you can sell to Grandma, that will work for her on a standalone basis. It can't require an Act of God to take it market. It has to be cheap enough that Grandma can buy it, and it has to be simple enough that it can be built by 3 guys in a shack in Palo Alto.
Often this means taking stuff that exists already and chopping off the most expensive features, even if they are the best features, to make it cheap enough for Grandma. Whole books have been published on this; lookup "The Innovator's Dilemma".
This is a completely different goal from the goals of research, which has to be new to be published. Taking an old idea, even which was impractical to build/deploy, and productizing it, is a very hard sell to the professors and very difficult to get published papers out of.
(Some academics just do not care about practicalities, no matter how hard one tries to persuade them.)
Both these situations are also completely different from the military, who care about maximum effectiveness even if it means throwing money at problems and even if it means redeploying the very oldest ideas. If a ceramic capacitor works, instead of a funky DSP algorithm, they'll use the ceramic capacitor. If it somehow proves necessary to defend against a nuclear attack, they'll switch the ceramic capacitor for a solid gold ingot in a heartbeat.
Often this means taking stuff that exists already and chopping off the most expensive features, even if they are the best features, to make it cheap enough for Grandma. Whole books have been published on this; lookup "The Innovator's Dilemma".
This is a completely different goal from the goals of research, which has to be new to be published. Taking an old idea, even which was impractical to build/deploy, and productizing it, is a very hard sell to the professors and very difficult to get published papers out of.
(Some academics just do not care about practicalities, no matter how hard one tries to persuade them.)
Both these situations are also completely different from the military, who care about maximum effectiveness even if it means throwing money at problems and even if it means redeploying the very oldest ideas. If a ceramic capacitor works, instead of a funky DSP algorithm, they'll use the ceramic capacitor. If it somehow proves necessary to defend against a nuclear attack, they'll switch the ceramic capacitor for a solid gold ingot in a heartbeat.
The incentives and goals are not aligned.