On the use of a life (2020)
Academics are not the place to go to make useful novel contributions, there are too many confounding factors.  First, the university owns whatever IP you come up with, and will happily exclusively license that IP to entities with no interest in developing it.  Monopolistic corporate power centers aren't known for fostering novel competition to their established businesses.  This is why it took so long - and serious capital - to get something like Tesla going, as the likes of Toyota, Ford, GM etc. were closely tied to Exxon, Chevron etc. via their investors, and had no interest in developing electric cars.Any kind of applied research in the US academic sector these days is best understood as corporate R & D for established interests in pharmaceuticals, technology, industrial chemistry, etc.  You're certainly not free to do blue-skies renewable energy research (budgets for that are still miniscule at best, and have been since the 1980s), for example.  The job description has become indistinguishable from that of in-house corporate researcher - narrowly defined assigned problems are what you get to work on, and 'academic freedom to pursue the research wherever it leads' is a quaint myth.The obvious fix is to eliminate exclusive licensing of academic IP (i.e. repeal the 1980s Bayh-Dole Act), which would force corporations to spend capital on their own private R & D divisions if the wanted exclusivity, and simply make any university-held patented discovery available to any entrepreneur who wanted to develop it for a small flat fee.Until then the author is 100% correct about entrepreneurship being the only way out of the trap.