[aswanson]

I don't get this. The whole point of university research is that it is too risky (or benefits will be too far in the future) to make it profitable for companies to pursue. I don't see how anything could be too risky for the university, but not too risky for a business.

I get it. I recall specifically posing a promising, if not clear-cut, research topic to my grad school advisor and his response "that's high risk".

Academia is more concerned with the volume of publications rather than impact and unique ideas. There are tremendous disincentives in the system for innovation.

[_delirium]

You can blame citation-counting and h-indexes for a decent amount of that latter part. If administrators who don't know enough about an area to individually judge the quality of someone's record are mainly using citations and h-index as proxies for quality, then the job of a junior researcher becomes to maximize those two numbers. There are various strategies for doing so, but one of the higher-probability ones is to churn out a lot of papers, and also to make them relatively similar to what other people in the field are already doing (so they'll cite them as related work in their next paper).

[neilc]

Academia is more concerned with the volume of publications rather than impact and unique ideas.

As a generalization, this is false. Certainly there is more emphasis on publication than is warranted, but most of the top places care much more about impact/reputation than about raw # of papers or citations. If you talk to people about how research labs hire newly-minted PhDs, how faculty are hired, or how tenure decisions are made, everything I've heard suggests that, at least for good places, they aren't just looking at the length of your pub list or the # of citations.

[amirmc]

"There are tremendous disincentives in the system for innovation"

I feel that's overstating it but even if not, is it worse than industry? I've found academia to be very accepting of different viewpoints and depending on the field, experimentation is encouraged.

In my viewpoint, if an advisor in academia calls something 'high-risk' it's within the context of the overall work. For example, in grad school, the aim is to make a contribution to the field and get a PhD. Several students I've known have followed 'promising' lines of work (after disregarding advice to contrary) and ended up with nothing.

[carterschonwald]

There's that issue too, and very true. (though what I'm currently up to is a project I started after I left my program)