Industry Consulting

I have done some consulting in the past. What you’ll find below is some advice on how to consult with industry while holding an academic job. I do not claim that this advice is right.

• Do not bring more people into the fold, unless you need to. Be especially worried about bringing more business folks to the meetings. If you do need to run the deal by your school, do it at the very last minute, even if they tell you otherwise.
• Get documentation from funding agencies about industry collaboration. Have a summary of the existing programs in mind.
• Industry folks really want elevator pitches. It should tell them right away what they can expect to get out of the collaboration. Slides might be good, but two slides are enough. It might go like this: “I’m Daniel Lemire and I am building an easy-to-use data mining tool. I’ll explain why you need this.”
• Have a live demo, if at all possible. Seeing actual code run inspires confidence. A demo should not be lengthy, nor detailed.
• People enjoy receiving copies of research papers even when they do not plan to read them.
• Be specific in your description. “We built a music recommender system” not “we are exploring machine learning techniques to recommend stuff to people.”
• Be ready to answer direct questions: “what do you want from us” or “what could we give you”. But do not get down to the details, especially intellectual property.
• Do not talk to industry people using academic terms. You have to change your vocabulary because nobody likes being lectured to. Especially when they have good reasons to think they know their stuff.
• If you are like me, you are very afraid of losing months of years of work on something that may not work. Be very worried that others, who only invest money or a small fraction of the their time, may be willing to risk the farm to make it big. Be especially worried of people who only invest money. They may be investing other people’s money. Be worried of business folks or employees who can recover easily from a failure.