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There's a story I've been reminding myself of from earlier in my career.

It's one that stays with me. It haunts me a little bit, paralyses me at times. For all of the excitement, the ideals, the societal impact that is genuinely part of the research that we are trying to do in fellowships, there is something else in play.

There is the far less often uttered truth of the ferocious competition for very limited resources. One of the most cutting quotes that has become branded on my insides, attributed to Henry Kissinger (and others) states that:

"Academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small."

And if you're reading or hearing that quote for the first time, you may find it somewhat belittling, almost certainly if you're in academia. I did. After some thought, I later took it as being more humbling than belittling because, early on in my career, I didn't have a way to articulate a lot of the more challenging elements of playing the academic game. Only when I started to work more in entrepreneurial circles did I understand the view distilled in that most cutting of quotes.

In entrepreneurship, there's a lot of people having to deal with a lot more money and direct responsibilities for employing people. I mean “directly” more so than in academia, where more or less everyone is a university employee. But this isn't me trying to make one side look more positive than the other.

As time has gone on, I’ve found more and more parallels between the academic and business worlds that were otherwise just dressed up in different terminologies. Academics recruit researchers into their team, and so too can entrepreneurs. Academics all bid for grants, entrepreneurs will pitch to investors. All the while, there is perhaps (on both sides) a veil of job security. But that’s really just as long as the money lasts and you can justify your position. You can get kicked out of an academic job just as you can get knocked off the board of your company. I realise there’s plenty of additional nuance here.

The parallels between the academic and entrepreneurial worlds are worth exploring, even if you don't really care for one side or the other. From either side of that fence, there are holes in the fence and ways to get from one side to the other. You can even sit on the fence.

That’s all a worthwhile digression because those parallels between academia and business have helped me manage one of the most mentally challenging aspects of trying to run a research team in academia.

The evergreen threat of being scooped.

You think you have an amazing research idea, you plan it, even start to invest the time in the experiments to see if your idea plays out. All of that can be exciting. Accelerating it can give you motivation when you're feeling at your worst and you invest, invest, invest. Until one morning, when scrolling through new journal articles, you see it before your eyes: a title, a graphical abstract, a summary of everything that you thought was born in your head alone, been manifest by someone else. Someone has got your idea out there and reported it to the world before you ever could. That, in a nutshell, is being scooped.

That's the way that we talk about it in academia. It's not to say the same thing doesn't happen in entrepreneurship. That's what drives intellectual property! In business, you're oftentimes trying your very best to build moats around the castle that is your intellectual property (IP) and to protect it from being penetrated by others who who would have or reverse engineer the IP for themselves.

Being scooped is not particular to one game, but it's in the academic game that I've been reflecting on because it clearly affected me more than many other experiences from my Ph.D. days.

One ordinary Friday, I looked at a paper that a colleague had pulled from the literature to discuss in a meeting. I saw the paper title, the graphical abstract, and it looked as if it had been just packed out of my head and put onto the paper. My shoulders went from my chin to my knees. I was just completely and utterly floored with the disappointment and the instantaneous depression of seeing that someone else had gone and done it. My seemingly precious idea was no longer mine.

My growing academic ego that made me naive enough to think that the idea that I had, the idea that I thought I had time to explore was so good as for others not to ever be able to conceive of it…but there it was before me. Someone out there pulled the trigger before I could. Someone else got off their ass, went into the lab and got the data.

That was the first time I was scooped, but it sure as hell wasn't the last. And it's only over a much longer period of time that I've come to to realise that it will always happen, so long as I try to formulate ideas that are only one or two steps ahead of those that we might be in respectful competition with.

And here then is where seeing the parallels rather than the distinctions between academia and entrepreneurship has proven to be really therapeutically beneficial for me. What I thought was my intellectual property was more of an incremental idea than I assumed. It was a good idea, but it wasn't so good as to be impossible to reverse engineer. It wasn't so good as to be independently conceived by someone else who wanted to work faster than I could.

It’s helped my research efforts to bring entrepreneurial thinking to the table.

How can you provide the impact you promise most, while protecting your team from being scooped?

Thanks for being here.

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