1.
All Researchers Should Become
Entrepreneurs
Jordi Cabot, Hugo Bruneliere, Gwendal Daniel, Abel
Gómez
@JordiCabot – jordicabot.com

2.
Starting point
• We all agree on the benefits of collab with industry to:
– Have more impact
– Improve our own research thanks to validation / feedback
• But it’s far from easy, especially in the current
economic context
– Companies are more concerned with their short-term
survival and cutting innovation budgets

3.
Research-Industry collaboration models
• Direct Transfer contracts
• Industrial PhDs
• Large Consortium projects (e.g. EU ECSEL)
• Co-production models
• Industrial Research Labs
• …
They all work (sometimes)

4.
Industrialization triangle

5.
A common problem

6.
Our solution: entrepreneurship path
If you can’t beat find
them join them!

7.
Commercial open source business model
Release
prototype as
OSS
Improve it to
be used in a
“kind of” real
environment
Kickstart a
community
Create
commercial
services /
extensions

8.
Example: Xatkit.com (OSS chatbot dev platform)
External DSL
– Tree
based
External DSL
– State
machine
Internal DSL Two DSLs
First paper Real chatbots
are not trees
And replies are
not just text
Users don’t want to
learn a new tool
+ many other useful feedback, e.g. target platforms, monitoring, trolls, bot generators

9.
When to stop

10.
Is this model really viable?
• Evaluation of researchers should be more based on impact than on
“bean counting”
– All universities signed the DORA declaration but…
• Researchers need to be taught business, marketing and financial
skills
– And must want to invest time on acquiring these skills
• Not easy! (but none of the other collab models is that easy either)

11.
jordi.cabot@icrea.cat
@JordiCabot
jordicabot.com