I have come across many different ideas during my last few years in the scientific and entrepreneurial communities. The form these ideas take have ranged from personal fellowships written by fellow grad students to multi-million-dollar research grants, small startups to large-scale industrial intellectual property. Across these I have seen many ways in which people approach an idea and try to convince others to essentially invest. As a grad student, you want organizations to invest in your future. As a professor, you want funding organizations to recognize your research has the potential to solve problems and advance society. As an entrepreneur, you want to convince investors you stand to make them money.
Circling around all these lines of thought are very fundamental similarities and differences. In this series of essays, I will break this down into 4 parts:
Part 1: What makes an idea exciting?
Part 2: What’s the best way to sell that idea?
Part 3: How do I clarify my thought processes?
Part 4: The crossroads of ideation and practicality.
Part 1: Selling Ambition – What makes an idea exciting?
Have you ever been bored while trying to engage with science? If so, you are welcome in the company of all scientists. Academic conferences and seminars are often plagued with material so niche that usually only a handful of researchers in the world can recognize its novelty.
I recently attended the American Society for Cell Biology conference. One session was dedicated to transport proteins. Quickly, an argument arose whether a specific protein interacted with another in “this” or “that” way. Honestly, I was completely lost for two reasons. Firstly, this science was completely outside of my expertise. Secondly, and more importantly, I was lost because I didn’t know why I should care. In fairness, this was a specific session meant for the experts in this field to have this type of conversation. Science progresses often because of these opportunities to have high-level discussions with the best in the field. However, this session was held in a room of over 200 people, and the opportunity to bring those with less expertise into the fold was ultimately lost.
Scientists often find themselves lost in this high-level thinking, even when trying to reach out to a broader audience. In fellowship proposals, grant applications, and oral presentations, researchers can find themselves explaining the intricacies of points Q and P while skipping over A and outright ignoring Z. That’s not to say these projects aren’t worthwhile or exciting, just that they fail to convince anyone it’s worth their attention.
So how can this be improved?
Maintain interest by being interested
One of the most common issues I see are proposals where the author is also bored with the project. Unless you’re really good at lying to yourself, the reader of the proposal can tell when there isn’t interest behind the project. Instead of trying to convince some abstract reader your project is exciting, you should instead make sure you’re convinced first. The same thought process applies to presentations and conversations.
As a reader or a listener, coming across as uninterested can mean a few things. Firstly, it tells me the work may not be that impactful. This is not to say the work is not worthwhile. Exciting projects have exciting implications. Grad students especially fall into this trap. We spend so long in the nitty gritty of our work we lose sight of how people perceive it. We’re often tempted to simplify our work: “I’m studying the stochastic effect of protein A on disease B.” Place any two words for A and B and you have a description for just about any research project in the world. You don’t want your project to fit into a mad libs. Focus first on the broader problem, then on how you plan to tackle it. Now you’re not just reciting your project in simple terms but telling people why what you’re doing is important and why they should care.
Be ambitious but with a clear path
Having an exciting idea is often enough to gain interest from people. However, the scientific community and investors often distrust excitement alone. There have been countless startup companies and research labs that have promised their work would change the field. Theranos is a classic example of a company where promises of groundbreaking technology were made and not brought to fruition. Projects like these have rightfully sown distrust. How you plan to achieve your goal, the methodology, needs to be clear.
You still need to maintain interest. Overly complex descriptions of science and engineering can lose the focus of experts in the field as well as novices. A few years ago, I participated in a three-minute thesis competition. I was being coached by someone with a business background. As I thought I was explaining my thesis clearly, I was asked, “What is a protein?” The simplicity of the question really made me think about how to talk about projects. Good ideas are broken into digestible chunks with clear goals. Let’s use curing cancer as an example.
Everyone can agree curing cancer is an important challenge many have tried and failed to solve. Let’s say you have an idea for a cure that no one has thought of before. However, the FDA is not going to let you try it in humans before proving it has merit. Break the idea into manageable sub-projects with clear pass or fail goals. First, we’ll test to see if the approach works at a molecular scale. Can your approach kill cancer cells? If it does not work, then we’ve learned more about cancer biology to influence future studies and approaches. If it works, then we can test it in a mouse to see if it can kill cancer without killing the mouse. If this does not work, we’ve learned something in this approach is preventing treatment. If it does, then we can try it in humans. Now you’ve phrased every aspect of the idea in terms of how it adds to increasing our ability to address cancer, not just as a cool project to try.
Tie everything back to your problem statement
While a single idea may be exciting, every aspect of it needs to relate back to the original problem statement. A huge issue I see when reading proposals is the work fails to address the problems they state. If the work you’re proposing doesn’t directly tackle the problem you stated, that means one or two things: the problem statement isn’t good enough and/or the project proposed isn’t appropriate for the problem.
Thinking back to your problem statement needs to be done continuously. I often find myself thinking, “Why am I doing this again?”. It’s easy in science to get caught up in side quests that don’t add anything to your research question. If your problem statement is strong enough, every experiment you run, or project you tackle, will have clear benefits. This extends beyond research and projects as well. Why am I going on a run? I hate running. Oh yeah, because I want to stay healthy. Why am I spending hours in the lab running this experiment? Oh yeah, because the results from this experiment could have major scientific implications. This harkens back to my prior conclusions on quantum theories and free will.
Overall, ideas gain interest when you are invested in the problem being proposed. When you convince people a problem is one worth solving, and that you know how to solve it, they’ll be more inclined to listen to you. The next challenge is convincing them you are the best person to do the work. Stay tuned for the next installment of this series, “Selling Stability,” where I talk about how to pitch an idea.
