I too have a PhD and a few papers. If you think generating a good hypothesis wasn’t the hard bit then in my opinion you never did get what science was about. In my opinion. Which is the minority among todays scientists. It’s like People dont even know what they’re doing wrong.

> If you think generating a good hypothesis wasn’t the hard bit then in my opinion you never did get what science was about [..]

Is a good hypothesis important? Sure. Is it easy to get that bit wrong? Yes, and lots of people do.

I'm reminded of one of Paul Graham's quotes:

"I also have a theory about why people think this. They overvalue ideas. They think creating a startup is just a matter of implementing some fabulous initial idea. And since a successful startup is worth millions of dollars, a good idea is therefore a million dollar idea [..] startup ideas are not million dollar ideas, and here's an experiment you can try to prove it: just try to sell one. Nothing evolves faster than markets. The fact that there's no market for startup ideas suggests there's no demand. Which means, in the narrow sense of the word, that startup ideas are worthless."[0]

[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html

I love PGs insights and I generally agree with his ideas article. But think about it, is a startup idea a hypothesis or something more than that? To the market each startup is perhaps a hypothesis, but for you as a founder the idea shouldn’t just be a hunch. It can be in initial stages but you need to validate it asap and iterate on it. Which is the message I took from his writing.

And this doesn’t even touch the question of what’s different between basic science and entrepreneurship.