The seminal paper on the double-helix structure for DNA by Crick and Watson ends up with the statement “It has not escaped our attention that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material”. A masterpiece of understatement. At the end of a research paper there is always a very helpful section that indicates where additional research could usefully be carried out.
If we are really going to bridge the gap between academic and practice could I suggest that there should also be a section headed ‘Implications for practitioners’ that the search community could then home in on as a source of potential competitive advantage. The catalyst for this suggestion was the excellent paper by Amit Kumar Jaiswal on image retrieval at TALMIRI that every vendor of a Digital Assessment Management application would be immediately interested in. A 2018 market analysis from Gartner lists out 19 vendors and indicates that the market for DAM applications in 2020 could be $5.2 billion. That should pay for a few PhD projects.