Most researchers entering a commercialisation programme understand the goal. Find the right people. Have 100 meaningful conversations. Build a value proposition through the process itself.
They also know LinkedIn is where those people are. They have profiles. They’ve been told to use them.
And yet, at the start of almost every cohort I work with, the profiles sit untouched.
The problem isn’t motivation. It’s the map they’ve been given.
Most LinkedIn guidance was written for the wrong person. The standard advice assumes someone with a polished product, an established market, and something ready to pitch. A researcher in the early stages of customer discovery has none of those things. They’re building their value proposition through the conversations, not before them.
Teaching that researcher to post like a salesperson produces, almost invariably, one awkward attempt and then silence. It feels wrong because it is wrong for where they are. And underneath the practical mismatch, there’s something more personal. Academic culture values precision and intellectual honesty. Cold outreach to strangers goes against both. So researchers do what any rigorous person does when given the wrong tool: they put it down.
The question that changes the frame
We’ve worked with enough ICURe cohorts and university enterprise programmes to know this isn’t a character flaw. It responds, quickly, to a single shift — and it starts with a different question.
Not “how do you use LinkedIn?” but: who do you want to talk to, and about what?
From that question, three things shift.
The profile becomes an invitation, not a CV. Positioned not to impress, but to signal to the right people: I’m working on this problem, thinking about these questions. Are you?
Posts become part of the customer discovery process, not a distraction from it. Share what you’re investigating — the problem you’re working on, the question you’re trying to answer. Not a pitch. A signal: I’m here. Let’s talk.
The conversations start coming to you. When the profile and the posts are working, 100 meaningful conversations stops feeling like a mountain. It becomes a matter of showing up in the right way for the right people.
What happens when researchers see it differently
One ICURe participant told me she’d been a cynic. Thirty minutes after our session, she posted — not a product announcement, but a genuine question to the people she was trying to reach. Three days later: 1,300 impressions, 16 reposts, 30 comments. More importantly, she had conversations.
That’s not a LinkedIn trick. That’s what happens when someone with something genuinely worth saying finally has the right reason to say it.
Without the reframe, the profile stays untouched. The 100-conversation target stalls. And the people who could most benefit from what your cohort is working on never get the chance to hear about it.