If you saw my column that went up yesterday at Inside Higher Ed, you’ll know that I claim to have never met “a single former academic who was able to apply their research directly into a non-academic job.” But in only the short span between writing that piece and the publication of it, my claim may now be untrue.
Last week I had the opportunity to meet Alexandra Samuel, the CEO of Social Signal, a company she runs out of Vancouver that helps organizations with their social media needs. She was making this presentation at a symposium we both were attending on health care organizations, knowledge translation and social media.
Turns out Alexandra has a Ph.D. in political science from Harvard, and wrote her dissertation on hacktivism. The company’s website (and it sure is a pretty one) actually says that their methodology comes from Alexandra’s dissertation research. Yes, you read that right: the scholarly work that this Ph.D. did is actually instrumental to the kind of work conducted by the company she runs. Here’s me, eating my words.
And, oh, yeah. Turns out she’s also worked with Robert Putnam (yeah, that one) and Angus Reid. And she’s got 2 kids. And her business partner is her marital partner. And she’s nice and funny, to boot. GAH.
Do you know of other scholars who’ve translated their scholarly research–and I mean their research, not the skills they’ve garnered–into their post-academic work?
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Here I was thinking very hard whether I know any examples among my acquaintances. Somebody being able to translate his/her research directly into post-academic work is not so frequent.
I see mainly only one way of doing so: Being entrepreneurial.
Either you can launch a company on your own (like Alexandra did), or your institute sees commercial value in your research and launches a spin-off. The latter is predestined for research in engineering / natural sciences / computer science.
Some examples for spin-off companies which I have heard of or where friends are working:
- An institute where an innovative method in biomedical histology was developed, and where the spin-off is now providing this method as a service to pharma corporations.
- Another spin-off where a specialized cryptological algorithm (research in computer science) was transformed into a software product.
- And then of course Stephen Wolfram (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Wolfram), who transformed his research in computer algebra into the now legendary software package Mathematica.