What’s Missing? How R&D Venture Studios Reveal Needs Before the Market Even Knows
Most innovation efforts begin by asking: “What technologies do we already have?”
At MIT Proto Ventures, we ask a different question:
What should exist—but doesn’t yet?
This is the foundational shift behind the R&D venture studio model. Rather than starting with available IP or existing research disclosures, we begin by identifying critical unmet needs—the gaps in infrastructure, markets, and systems that are holding back progress but aren’t yet being solved.
We believe the most impactful startups aren’t built from what’s already on the shelf.
They’re built from what’s missing.
Why This Matters
R&D institutions are great at generating technologies.
But they often struggle to define urgent, unaddressed problems that cut across domains and stakeholders.
The result? Dozens of technically promising inventions that don’t connect to real pain points, and billions in R&D that fail to reach the market.
That’s why, in every new venture channel, we begin with structured need-finding.
Our Process: Surfacing Latent Demand
Each Proto Ventures studio channel—whether in clean energy, semiconductors, AI for healthcare, or beyond—starts with dozens or hundreds of expert interviews across:
Startup founders
Corporate innovation teams
Regulators and procurement officers
Domain researchers and policy experts
We ask questions like:
What infrastructure is breaking?
What workarounds are people relying on?
What’s under-discussed, but increasingly urgent?
Where are current tools misaligned with future demand?
We synthesize these into a living database of market gaps, tagged by severity, affected stakeholders, regulatory context, and opportunity landscape.
Real Example: InterLink and the Missing Grid Intelligence Layer
In 2024, I began collaborating with two MIT Proto Ventures Fellows, DeAndrea Salvador and Nidhi Verma, to explore the growing dysfunction in the U.S. power grid—specifically around grid interconnection.
We interviewed developers, ISO staff, regulators, and utility engineers. Over and over, we heard the same story:
The clean energy transition is stalling—not for lack of ambition, but because developers, ISOs, and utilities are flying blind.
At the heart of the problem was an invisible bottleneck:
2,600+ GW of projects stuck in interconnection queues
Opaque timelines, manual studies, and unpredictable upgrade costs
Billions in lost value due to poor coordination across stakeholders
And no one was solving it.
That insight helped catalyze the launch of InterLink—a new venture focused on building the coordination and intelligence layer for grid interconnection.
Interlink is now building a crucial solution to this problem, leveraging unique technology and know-how from MIT.
The market need existed well before the company did.
What made InterLink possible was identifying that gap—and designing the venture to fill it.
In reviewing this article draft, Nidhi also told me:
As a PV Fellow, one of the other things was the access to connections in labs and research, which brought us to Pablo [Dueñas-Martinez, a power systems researcher at the MIT Energy Initiative] and other researchers early on and made this journey very exciting. The market research ranged from industry to academia which makes Proto Ventures unique.
Why Studios Are Built for This Work
Tech transfer offices manage disclosures.
Entrepreneurship centers support people with startup ideas.
But neither is designed to systematically identify structural absences—the kind of opportunities that cross boundaries between policy, infrastructure, science, and software.
That’s where venture studios shine.
We go upstream.
We look for non-obvious white space, and then shape ventures around it—often before anyone else sees the opportunity.
Final Thought
If you want to build ventures that shape the future—not just follow it—you have to start with need, not novelty.
At MIT Proto Ventures, we believe that seeing what’s missing is a skill—and a system.
It’s how InterLink was born. And it’s how we’ll continue to build ventures that matter.
🛠️ Want to learn how to build this kind of market-sensing into your own innovation program?
Stay tuned for the release of our R&D Venture Studio Playbook, coming soon.
Next in our series: “Building Inside, Not Outside—Why In-House Studios Beat External Partners.”