Hope YCR works.  Suggestion:  
Get a board of advisors who 
have had a lot of experience 
managing research, and let them
occasionally advise you on
opportunities and pit falls.<p>I got an applied math Ph.D.,
just to improve the good
career I already had going in
applied math and computing,
had no intention of being a
professor, but for a while,
having to do with my wife in
her long illness, I was a professor.<p>The biggest problem I had in research
was just getting the mathematical
word processing done.  The typing
was much more difficult than the
research!  I published some papers
in some good journals and never
had a paper rejected or needing
significant revision.  I could
have done a lot more in research,
but I was really interested just
in making money.<p>For research in academics, that is,
the STEM fields, I have long 
had a suggestion:  Borrow from 
research in medicine!<p>Why, how,
in what respects?  Sure:  Research
in medicine also has a clinical
side, and a lot of the research,
applied research intended to 
connect with applications, very
much needs the clinical side.<p>E.g., instead of all the seminars
being professors and students presenting
solutions still looking for 
applications, have about half the
seminars with people 
from the <i>real world</i> outside
academics present problems
looking for solutions.
Have professors
with their students attack such
problems.  That way could
get some problems to work on,
simple, medium, and really 
difficult and important, e.g.,
P versus NP just from 
applications of optimization
to, say, vehicle scheduling
or communications network
design.  E.g., I was working
on something applied and
rediscovered k-D trees --
a few years earlier and I
would have been the inventor
of k-D trees.  And there are
other examples of starting
with a real problem from the
real world and getting good
results for that problem,
getting a good research problem,
and getting some good research
progress.<p>Besides, such research already
has one application and, thus,
is much more likely to have
two or many more than two.<p>Have an expectation that a professor
pursuing applications is a 
professional and needs to practice
their profession.  And the students
need to be there also as apprentices.<p>Also, have codes of ethics,
standards on how revenue is to
be distributed, and professional
peer review of the clinical
practice.<p>For more, it would help if the
venture capital community were
ready, willing, and able to
evaluate original research
intended as the crucial core
of startups.