<i>I&#x27;m getting kind of sick of this tactic, where this fake concession is made before going on about how academia isn&#x27;t designed well enough to deliver to industry.</i><p>This +1, er +1,000,000.<p>I would firmly state that academia by definition is not supposed to &#x27;deliver to industry&#x27;, and not even to society.  The whole point of academia is to give the very smartest people (whatever that means) the freedom to explore ideas, so that a some point humanity may benefit from their ideas, experiments, and research.<p>My point is that it could be any number of generations of research from the current generation of (what seems like quack) research (to the establishment) will turn into being instrumental to our understanding of the universe.  Galileo Galilei (and Copernicus) for instance.  Their ideas (and research) did not sit well with the establishment of the Church (which was pretty much the central authority of everything at the time), but their ideas are now central to our understanding of our Solar system.<p>edit: formatting.