It's understandable that being up-to-date with the latest academic results doesn't guarantee success. There are many, many other factors that determine the eventual success of a startup, and therefore it's investment appeal.
But I didn't see the article as a complaint that "investors are wrong", but rather "before you spend months inventing and building a new UX flow, take a few days to read about the latest research".
If a developer needs a balanced binary tree, they will first look for an existing implementation in the language they are using. If one doesn't exist, a good developer will check Knuth/CLRS/Wikipedia for the suitable algorithms and build it based on these recommendations, instead of jumping in and hacking something together on the spot.
I think the article argues that UX and product design could use a similar approach. If you are deliberately testing a new approach, sure, go build whatever comes to mind. But if you just need an "incentive mechanism" in your app, then it makes sense to read up about the existing research on what kinds and how large incentives work, instead of making a guess on the spot. And even if you are innovating on some aspect, it's useful to use the existing best practices as the starting point and improve & measure from there.
But I didn't see the article as a complaint that "investors are wrong", but rather "before you spend months inventing and building a new UX flow, take a few days to read about the latest research".
If a developer needs a balanced binary tree, they will first look for an existing implementation in the language they are using. If one doesn't exist, a good developer will check Knuth/CLRS/Wikipedia for the suitable algorithms and build it based on these recommendations, instead of jumping in and hacking something together on the spot.
I think the article argues that UX and product design could use a similar approach. If you are deliberately testing a new approach, sure, go build whatever comes to mind. But if you just need an "incentive mechanism" in your app, then it makes sense to read up about the existing research on what kinds and how large incentives work, instead of making a guess on the spot. And even if you are innovating on some aspect, it's useful to use the existing best practices as the starting point and improve & measure from there.