To academics, ideas are everything. For a startup, an idea is merely a jumping off point.
This is why you so often see breakdowns in attempts to spin something out of a university. A professor thinks they deserve a huge chunk of equity for contributing to ideas, but has no time to truly contribute to execution. The entrepreneur team and savvy investors know otherwise. Enter huge hissy fit cap-table fight, stage right.
As an acaedmic and an entrepreneur, I find it disappointing when people keep on saying that "ideas do not matter, only execution does". In my experience, it takes a long time and a lot of effort to do the research that generates a good idea, but it takes very little time and effort to steal that idea.
Yes, I know execution matters a great deal, and I have done a lot of work executing on my ideas. But my point is that people who say ideas are the easy part often mean that it is very easy for them to take someone else's idea and that they have no need to do the difficult part of coming up with an idea in the first place. This is why the patent system was created, and the patent system was a key contributors to the West's rise to prominence. (I say this as an Arab who grew up watching the effects of piracy, and the crippling effects on a society of not respecting intellect.)
In the longer term, I do believe that ideas matter, and that dismissing the work of academics is dangerous to the competitiveness of Anglo-Saxon societies.
No one believes that they don't. The question is how much they matter.
> that dismissing the work of academics is dangerous
Why is it more dangerous to dismiss the work of academics than it is to dismiss the work of other people?
Note that the "ideas aren're worth much" folks aren't restricting that to ideas from academics. Are academics as egalitarian wrt ideas from non-academics?
You aren't joking - I can remember huge arguments on EU Esprit projects over who owned the IP when anyone actually involved at the grunt level could have told everyone concerned that nobody was ever going to use any of the stuff produced so IP issues were irrelevant.
To academics, ideas are everything. For a startup, an idea is merely a jumping off point.
This is why you so often see breakdowns in attempts to spin something out of a university. A professor thinks they deserve a huge chunk of equity for contributing to ideas, but has no time to truly contribute to execution. The entrepreneur team and savvy investors know otherwise. Enter huge hissy fit cap-table fight, stage right.