There is a feature of entrepreneurial thinking, of design thinking that makes working as an academic very powerful.  Solve a problem or making a product that people need.  How do you train yourself in noticing what people need?  Sometimes we will be told that people need things or we need them and presume that other people do too.   Sometimes we have to simply be present and notice things.

This article charts the Biodesign process at Stanford University.

The immediately useful part of the article is the section under Finding Needs.

Unmet needs, not better solutions.  In software development I used to say that a user should tell me what it is that they want to do, not how they want to do it.

“Develop me some software that fetches the sales totals and litres pumped from the petrol pump and displays it in a sales window“ would be the request and is possibly the solution… but, if the need is that “the system should reduce fraud or drive-offs” then I want to know the latter.  I could develop a solution more powerfully if I was told what that unmet need is.

What flows from Finding Needs in the University context?  It leads to better research and more useful research which, besides having the obvious benefits of looking good on the Impact section of a grant application, could lead to the kind of product that is more easily commercialised.