<p>Some one told me that all the money, innovations, and technological breakthroughs are in the corporate world. Is that true? I want to stay in academia, then become a professor, but apparently, corporate world is better for research. I can become a professor either way.</p>
<p>And to be specific, I am talking about robotics/artificial intelligence, quantum computing, massively parallel processing, traditional computer architectures and stuff like that.</p>
<p>Now, I am not looking for money, just pure knowledge.</p>
<p>Nope, that’s not true. There is often a strong interdependency between the two. The big breakthrough’s often times start in academia, are then commercialized, and finally brought to market in the corporate world. </p>
<p>I was just looking last night at a list of start-up grants given out by the state of Texas (about 300 mil) during the last three years. Each start-up was in the private sector, but each of them was required to have an affiliation with a state university. I’m not sure how strong the relationship was between the companies and the university, and I have a feeling that some times there wasn’t much of any real relationship at all, but the relationship was still required.</p>
<p>In general, the closer the idea is to profit, the closer it is to industry. For any given technology, the initial research is a long way from being “shelf-ready” and is done at a university. Conversely, the final research steps required to take it to customers take place at a corporation, sometimes one created for that specific technology. </p>
<p>If a corporation discovers that a particular research thread is too far from market, they will often send it back to a friendly university researcher to pursue, unless they feel that there is some overwhelming competitive advantage to developing it entirely in house. If a university researcher discovers something profitable NOW, it will either be licensed to a corporation or the researcher will create a company to develop it - this is what happened to Google.</p>
<p>So you just need to decide whether you want to do early-stage developmental research or late-stage final application research. Both are significant, both are cool, and both pay well… just pick.</p>
<p>I really think you can have a little bit of both (late stage and early stage research) if you choose to.</p>