What happens when you find an ongoing problem and start brainstorming the solution? Well, maybe you stumble upon a brilliant startup.

We may think of businesses as being developed by experienced business people who are long out of school, but more and more entrepreneurial businesses are being launched out of dorm rooms and off-campus apartments.

Ariel Katz, Kalman Victor, and Zachary Feuerstein are students, but they hold other titles as well: CEO, CPO, and CTO, respectively.

And their story is a classic example of entrepreneurship, where, in a college dorm room, an idea can give birth to a brilliant, growing company.

The problem emerges.

It started out as a couple of undergraduate students with a shared problem. Best friends Ariel Katz, at SUNY Binghamton, and Kalman Victor, at Columbia, discovered they were both having a hard time finding out about all the research being conducted at their university and how to get involved. They ran into similar issues when they started to search for graduate research positions and realized there was no source to learn about all the research happening at universities across America.

The scope expands.

Katz and Victor soon realized that many others shared their problem. Nationwide, students were having trouble finding research positions at their college or university, and prospective graduate students were searching laboriously for programs offering a lab in their own field of interest. Connecting to research was even more difficult for high school students and others outside traditional academia.

The answer develops.

It's not uncommon to make the leap from a difficulty to the "hey, wouldn't it be great if...?" phase, but getting to actual implementation is much more difficult. Katz and Victor cleared those hurdles with the help of a chief technology officer, Zachary Feuerstein, and today their smart idea is a fast-growing company.

The result surfaces.

The platform allows students, faculty members, and others to find out about current research at any university, and anyone with an interest in recent publications and patents to learn about the newest research breakthroughs. Students can even apply to work in a lab directly through the platform. It's a one-stop site -- think Google meets Linkedin -- for research.

The name matters.

Katz and Victor's centralized location for industry, government, universities, researchers, and students to connect and collaborate is being built through one university partnership at a time, and the partners gave it a name that's simple, memorable, and descriptive: ResearchConnection.

Having an idea is great, but actually making it happen takes the right people in the right mindset. The only way to move it forward is to make sure you have connections and the tenacity to get it in the hands of those who truly need it.