[olliesaunders]

This observation about technical innovation being only half the work in getting new technologies to market is something you could say about universities: my belief is that university research only goes about half the way necessary to get new ideas into the commercial world. Academics start companies to partly address that problem but mostly these operate in very specialized spaces; the academics get rich but the wider world sees little benefit. What if universities did what PARC is doing now?

[agilebyte]

That kind of "academics" is done at Microsoft Research et al. If your focus is "papers", you will very often only do the first part as you mention.