Customer requests tell you where the field already is. Academic collaborations take you to where it isn't yet.
Customer requests tell you where the field already is. Academic collaborations take you to where it isn't yet.
That's the honest reason we keep doing academic work alongside the commercial side, and why we do research and publish it.
A customer request is, by definition, a problem someone has already decided is worth solving. Somebody scoped it, justified it, and put it on a roadmap. That makes it real and it makes it fundable, and it also means the interesting question has already been settled: this is a problem worth having.
The work that teaches us most tends to sit before that point. Chemistry that isn't routine yet. Systems where we don't know whether the approach transfers. Problems where the honest answer is that it might not work, which is exactly why no commercial roadmap will carry them.
We have collaborations running in several fields: flow chemistry and lab automation, autonomous experimentation with PAT integration, multi-objective optimization in electro- and photochemistry. Some of its learnings will end up in the platform. Some of it won't, and we knew that going in.
The other part is simpler. @Daniel Wigh and I both did PhDs in this field, and that doesn't switch off when you incorporate a company. There's a kind of curiosity that only gets satisfied by working on something nobody has published yet.
Some of what matters most in our platform started as questions nobody was paying us to answer.
So we keep doing it.
