Ask HN: Why academic researchers aren't rewarded according to their impact?

[BTeam]

Everyone involved in any innovation cycle depends on academic research one way or another. That's especially true in the field of Information Technology. The 'success' that people seek is based on the advancement of general Human knowledge that is gracefully provided to them for free. Customers praise the companies 'geniuses' for doing this or that, but at the end of the day, their job has been to make profit out of these researches.

One might say that people are either driven by money or recognition. To be fair, I think most of contemporary researchers do not get a cut of anything. They rather struggles to fund their careers.

How can our society be so manipulative towards our brightest minds? How can we keep open research and fairly distribute rewards?