An academic entrepreneur’s life in Prague

Introduction by Science|Business: It’s tough starting a technology business anywhere – but that’s especially true in Central and Eastern Europe. Last week, Science|Business published a viewpoint on the state of tech-transfer in Prague from a researcher at the big Czech Technical University there. This week,  we offer an alternate view – from an entrepreneur who has been trying to build a business in collaboration with academics there.

The task has not been easy, writes Ivo Smelhaus, the head of TrainingPoint.  The organisation, begun as an EU-funded project, hires academics to provide technical training to industry and others. Its biggest challenge: the local academic culture.

His views, while focused on Prague, may not seem so foreign to business people elsewhere in the world who try to work with often-reluctant academics.

Ivo Smelhaus: the task has not been easy.

1. There are generally no usable rules.
   
   
2. The most common answer to the question, “Why?” is: “It’s always been done like that.”
   
   
3. In an academic setting there is no immediate customer need, no market force to produce “value.” Merely to produce reports is good enough. As a consequence, anyone who seeks to produce immediate value (such as a tangible product) is highly discouraged, because producing academic papers is much faster and easier.  Academicians are primarily evaluated based on their quantity of research, not on delivering tangible products based on market need.
   
   
4. In academia it is almost impossible to find an argument for pursuing any business at all, or at least for pursuing business in a financially optimal way. In other words, the university is actually looking for cost-covering sponsors, not for business incubators.
   
   
5. Fulfilling plan conditions takes top priority. Final product quality is (almost) irrelevant.
   
   
6. In a normal business, if you do not supply the ordered goods in time, you may very well go bankrupt. Within academia they are not directly answerable to market forces. If you use the university as a primary supplier of inputs you will never be able to keep any delivery agreements with your customers. In practical terms, this manifests itself in very rarely hearing “NO” from the staff, but at the same time also very rarely getting the required input on schedule.
7. Staff use vague, non-committal language.
   
   
8. Risk-taking is completely foreign to academia.  I never saw it here.
   
   
9. There is actually no metric to differentiate between bad and good results. Or the metric is unusable.
   
   
10. For academic teaching it is often enough to study books and articles. However, businesses want information that can be immediately and profitably applied to their operations.
    
    
11. Few here understand that when a boss delegates responsibility to subordinates the boss has to delegate also the authority and accept appropriate actions of his/her subordinate.

A few examples:

• To establish a stable team for a project like Trainingpoint and not to use students for particular tasks was something new here.
  
  
• Prior to creating graphical training materials I wanted to standardise the picture format (jpg, png, ...), we would use. Instead of the 10- or 20-minute discussion that I expected, it took several hours without any firm conclusion. So, I had to use my own discretion in standardising the format. The point of view of some people was that standardising the picture format impairs their academic freedom.
  
  
• The break-even point for us is only reached at a turnover of more than €500,000, which no one here identified as a problem.  Many people here believe such sales would magically appear overnight.
  
  
• The focus of tech-transfer here is on attracting companies to cooperate with the university. What happens after the cooperation begins is not their responsibility, even if the problem is CTU staff’s unwillingness to partner with a business. Marketing without a product is nonsense. 
  
  
• A common attitude here: “You won’t starve, but you also won’t get much help reaching your goal. You will be able to continue to work quietly like any other employee here.“ The consequence is that anyone who comes here and wants to ‘get things done’ has three possibilities:

Fight against everybody and the entire academic system

Leave

Forget that the reason for doing things is to reach a goal, to be successful, to build something useful. Instead, stay on as a “good employee”.  Thanks to the current academic culture there is no risk that things will significantly change.

• To fulfill all the conditions of our EU project and to comply with the university’s rules we could realistically discount any possibility of building an economically viable business.

I do not have the time or power to analyse all my experiences and to put it into a more logical structure, so please take all of this just as my observations and ideas. The result is that there is no “hard” barrier to found a business within the university. But to manage a well-run business within such an academically driven environment or culture is really truly difficult.