So you want to do a Startup – the “A” projects

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A is for “Academics”.  If you are a boot-strapped developer that learnt coding on the job, this is very likely not for you.

 

Academic literature is full of research that can be rolled into products or components. If you are a Computer Science Grad (or post grad) then a membership to IEEE and/or ACM is a must – solely to get access to their electronic libraries of journal and conference proceedings.

 

What you will discover are mountains of research which have not been developed into products or components. For example, one of my current project is to research and derive advance Role Base Access component that supports Policy, Distributed,  Temporal and Special.  I’m in the midst of reviewing the literature (for a bibliography of what I am reading is here).  This type of system is needed by most large organizations – for example: Hospitals (HIIPA), Banks and other financial organizations, large corporations. If you google, you will find that there are offerings in this area, for example Omada’s offerings.

 

You may ask, surely, their own IT group will write it themselves! Wrong, or should I say should be wrong – they may attempt to do it, but the project will likely end up being a kludge and will fail.

 

In my RBAC work above, you will see that most of the works is in the last 5 years and that there is a large volume….  in-house developers (even those with B.Sc. in Computer Science) will have trouble reading the literature.

 

If your academic training is in psychology, or HR – you will find similar bare fields waiting to be ploughed. Academics research, startup produces!

 

There is one important gotcha --- beware of stuff that is “owned” by someone.

For example, SCRUM is open but there are dominant groups, like the ScrumAlliance,  you need to join and play nicely with such groups.

 

The business model is more a garage-startup and not an angel-funded startup…  Personally, I think a lot of people are looking for Angel Funding that should be doing garage startups. It reminds me a bit of folks trying to cash in during the dotCom boom. Are you going to Angels to pay you to do a garage startup OR because you need the funding for items OTHER than labor. If the money is needed for labor ---  get some friends together and boot-strap yourself. If it is needed for equipment, paying for advertising, etc then you should see an Angel Group – but your garage startup should have delivered at least a CTP product…

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