I used to think the gap between academia and industry was a personality clash, like two people at a party who keep talking about different sports and pretend they understand each other. After a long conversation with Raphael Smals, it’s clearer there’s more going on, systemic stuff, structural incentives, the kind of boring mechanics that quietly wreck useful exchanges. If you teach, invest, hire, supervise a thesis, or just want better conversations with the other side, this matters.
On the academic side, the system is tuned for publication. You know the line, publish or perish, it is real, and it shapes everything. Lecturers have 15 thesis students, heavy reading loads, and very little slack. Raphael put it bluntly, you should be doing your account management, meaning spend time maintaining relationships with real organizations, half a day a week if possible. Most academics do not have that time. The selection mechanism in universities rewards people who are good at academic tasks, not necessarily those who are excellent at running, or collaborating with, businesses. The two cultures reward different behaviors, and the gap widens.
On the industry side, organizations have legitimate reasons to be cautious, there is risk and bureaucracy. Yet what often happens when universities promise industry links, the connections can be superficial, someone knows someone at Microsoft, and that becomes a purported partnership. I saw this firsthand, and it is frustrating because students sign up with real expectations. From a business perspective, “yes” to interviews from companies can feel trivial, but the payoff is huge. As Raphael said, please say yes, it only costs you an hour of your time and it really adds value if you do something useful with it.
Those two dynamics produce misaligned expectations. Companies expect turnkey research that fixes their problem, academics produce careful studies that are often published years later and read mostly by other academics, and students get caught in the middle.
There are two dangerous extremes teaching entrepreneurship tends to fall into. One is the charismatic founder telling a how-to story based on N equals one, that is, my single experience, trust me, it works. The other is a distant academic approach, here are big studies and statistical generalizations, follow the formula. Both are useful, both are incomplete.
A lot of entrepreneurship books and shows are useful as sources of inspiration and practice, but academics distrust practice-oriented books because they can lack rigorous validation. Meanwhile academia publishes slowly, often taking two to five years to pass research through peer review and the publication pipeline. By the time a lesson reaches practitioners, the world has moved on. That lag is not just an academic problem, it is a practical one.
That is why simple, concrete artifacts matter. The classic line I often repeat is, no business plan survives first customer interaction. Put differently, don’t write a tombstone of a plan you will never touch again. Make something that communicates, that is testable, that changes when reality says it must.
There is no single fix, but there are practical steps that nudge the two sides toward each other. These are low friction, and yes, I’m guilty of saying the obvious because the obvious tends to be ignored.
There is an underrated set of skills that matter for entrepreneurship yet often does not get taught explicitly. How do you balance conviction with openness? Successful entrepreneurs tend to have a clear worldview and hold conviction, yet they are not immune to valid criticism. Learn to filter criticism, probe a bit, then decide if it is actionable or noise. As Raphael observed, you can spend too much time critiquing something into paralysis, or you can ignore everything and barrel ahead into nonsense. The art is the filter, which is teachable as a set of behaviors, not as a one-size doctrine.
Also, being honest when you do not know is underrated. Saying “I don’t know” is fine, even refreshing. It opens space for better questions, and often better answers.
The disconnect between academia and industry is not a tragic flaw, it is a design problem. If you are in academia, step out more, keep relationships alive, translate your work into usable formats. If you are in business, agree to be part of the conversation, even if it is inconvenient. If you teach entrepreneurship, stop pretending there is a single right method and teach students how to test, probe, and adapt in the real world.
I like the notion of changing the world by nudging others to change it, it is lazy and effective, and in my experience, the quickest way to do that is to talk less about perfect answers and more about usable questions.
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