For some reason, in the past few weeks I have talked to more than a few PhD students and researchers about various ideas. It is striking how often fundamentally very smart people have a problem in articulating just why what they are doing is useful, relevant, and potentially commercially interesting. Of course, we all know that this is hard, and all PhD students get some kind of training in presentation and selling their ideas. It is also unfair to expect a fresh graduate student to be able to put on a show like a Simon Peyton-Jones.
However, this did get me thinking some about the articulation of problems.