alt Hacker NewsIn my totally uneducated opinion as a founder working on winding down my software company that can't differentiate anymore and considering finding someone in hard tech to partner with, I think problem first is a mistake. Problem first is appropriate for a business, but for a lab, I think it should be organized around the art of possible, deep specialization and capabilities first. You never know what valuable things will come out of that process. Once you have something promising, you can match it to problems and make a business case working backwards from you. Generally startups are the opposite, you want to organize them around a customer and a problem, but fundamental R&D != startups.
How does R&D get revenue? I don't know how it is for hard tech, but from my understanding of these "researchy small team" labs in software, what ends up happening is that you find a bunch of small contracts to solve, throw really smart people at it, with the intent that you slowly build up internal core tools on the contract's dime. It's much less "hey someone gave us a bunch of money, let's explore this core thing" rather than almost "grifting" in a sense (well, it's not grifting because you provide value, you provide the service, but it's not the idea of "pure applied research" anymore on your end).