Industrial Research with Peter van Hardenberg [Idea Machines #50]

Peter van Hardenberg talks about Industrialists vs. Academics, Ink&Switch's evolution over time, the Hollywood Model, internal lab infrastructure, and more!

Peter is the lab director and CEO of Ink&Switch, a private, creator oriented, computing research lab. 

References

• Ink&Switch (and their many publications)
• The Hollywood Model in R&D
• Idea Machines Episode with Adam Wiggins
• Paul Erdós

Transcript

Peter Van Hardenberg

[00:01:21] Ben: Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Peter van Hardenbergh. Peter is the lab director and CEO of Inkin switch. Private creator oriented, competing research lab. I talked to Adam Wiggins, one of inkind switches founders, [00:01:35] way back in episode number four. It's amazing to see the progress they've made as an organization.

They've built up an incredible community of fellow travelers and consistently released research reports that gesture at possibilities for competing that are orthogonal to the current hype cycles. Peter frequently destroys my complacency with his ability to step outside the way that research has normally done and ask, how should we be operating, given our constraints and goals. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Peter.

Would you break down your distinction between academics and industrialists

[00:02:08] Peter: Okay. Academics are people whose incentive structure is connected to the institutional rewards of the publishing industry, right? You, you publish papers. And you get tenure and like, it's a, it's, it's not so cynical or reductive, but like fundamentally the time cycles are long, right? Like you have to finish work according to when, you know, submission deadlines for a conference are, you know, you're [00:02:35] working on something now.

You might come back to it next quarter or next year or in five years, right? Whereas when you're in industry, you're connected to users, you're connected to people at the end of the day who need to touch and hold and use the thing. And you know, you have to get money from them to keep going. And so you have a very different perspective on like time and money and space and what's possible.

And the real challenge in terms of connecting these two, you know, I didn't invent the idea of pace layers, right? They, they operate at different pace layers. Academia is often intergenerational, right? Whereas industry is like, you have to make enough money every quarter. To keep the bank account from going below zero or everybody goes home,

[00:03:17] Ben: Right. Did. Was it Stuart Brand who invented

pace

[00:03:22] Peter: believe it was Stewart Brand. Pace layers. Yeah.

[00:03:25] Ben: That actually I, I'd never put these two them together, but the, the idea I, I, I think about impedance mismatches

between [00:03:35] organizations a lot. And that really sort of like clicks with pace layers Exactly. Right. Where it's like

[00:03:39] Peter: Yeah, absolutely. And, and I think in a big way what we're doing at, Ink& Switch on some level is trying to provide like synchro mesh between academia and industry, right? Because they, the academics are moving on a time scale and with an ambition that's hard for industry to match, right? But also,

Academics.

Often I think in computer science are like, have a shortage of good understanding about what the real problems people are facing in the world today are. They're not disinterested.