I’m obsessed with interdisciplinarity, finding connections between disparate fields and seeing how new ideas can exist in the liminal spaces between domains.

While I’ve long thought that some of this interdisciplinary progress is best suited for the world of startups, what happens in startups alone is often not enough. Startups—particularly those steeped in the world of deep science and technology—can flourish best when drawing upon the free-ranging findings from the world of research. When a startup is experimenting and searching for solutions to hard problems, it is important to look in unconventional places, including the world of research and academia. And conversely, the world of research can also benefit from the experimentation that can only be found in the living laboratory of the startup world—an environment filled with pressure, constraints, and high consequence decisions. At Lux, we’ve been spending a lot of time connecting numerous researchers to our portfolio companies, exposing them to new ideas and potential avenues to explore.

We’ve connected those at the forefront of open data and scientific reproducibility to our companies that are reinventing how science is done. We’ve brought data visualization experts together with our biology startups, and linked applied mathematicians to our companies that are rethinking the world of manufacturing. We’ve even connected a science fiction writer to an AI startup, because Who knows? Over time, we’ve been building a stable of top-notch researchers, engaged in ideas from all across technology and the sciences.

As we’ve been making these connections, doing our best to link numerous areas of science and technology together, it’s become clear that these informal interactions are the beginning of something bigger: our portfolio of companies can, and should, act as a laboratory for research ideas, providing a way for both founders and researchers to connect their work and apply the findings from academia practically and commercially. Researchers will gain from exposure to a real-world laboratory and startups will gain from exposure to ideas that they might never have otherwise come across.

So, as we continue to link the world of startups with research, let’s make this call explicit: are you an academic or researcher interested in using our portfolio as a laboratory for ideas, applying your research and strengthening one of our startups? We want to know.