[astrange]

You can get a lot of valuable work out of "unmanageable" academics if you figure out how to manage them. That's most of the secret of early Google's success. If we knew anything about the NSA it'd probably be how they work too.

Now this may be difficult in the UK because all jobs pay two quid a year, you have to live in a closet somewhere with a name like Pennyfarthing-upon-Longbottoms, and you can't get air conditioning without permission from the king.

[Fade_Dance]

Renaissance Technologies as well. One of the top quant trading firms, with a bit of a mythical aura around them, was specifically seeded with academics, and it also has an academic-style internal environment (vs other quant funds, which also hire academics but leave most of the culture at the door).

Also seeded with NSA talent, with a founder who worked in academia and codebreaking, just to make your comment even more relevant.

[potato3732842]

The way you "manage" them is you water down their impact on the organization with a bunch of people who aren't academics.

[qcnguy]

Eh no not really. Google's early success came from PhD dropouts (Larry Page & Sergey Brin), combined with people like Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat (formerly at DEC), and the lesser known but no less critical Eric Veach (formerly Pixar).

Those are the people behind the core innovations that made Google so powerful: PageRank, MapReduce, BigTable, the indexing pipeline, protobufs/Stubby, GFS, AdWords, AdSense and the use of ML in both (iirc Veach was a key reason the ads system worked so well).

So none of the names I associate with early Google were academics. They all came from industry.