It's the author of the article that seems weird, not the researcher.
A major risk in academia is picking a dead-end niche. We hear about the people who picked an unlikely winner. This one picked mRNA vaccines. The inventor of MRI scanning had similar problems. He was almost fired. Those two succeeded, eventually. But the people who work on E-beam lithography or vaccines against addiction didn't do so well. Both of those would have been huge if they worked well. You can't tell in advance. If you could, the problem didn't need research.
A more useful way to look at this is that doing it and selling it are different skills. This is why companies have separate R&D, production, and marketing departments. If you face a hard problem in one of those areas, you can't devote enough time to the others. This is to some extent a time management and division of labor problem.
Academia is not team-oriented in that sense. At least below the principal investigator level. Once reaching that level, university PR departments are happy to hype any modest advance into a major breakthrough. Below that level, it's a cold world. Academia seems to have built itself a dysfunctional world - a huge bureaucracy, not much of a career path for real researchers, and a shrinking pool of full professorships. So anybody who is any good goes to a startup now.
Henry Kissinger, who was not lacking in people skills, once commented that "academic policy is so vicious because the stakes are so low".
A major risk in academia is picking a dead-end niche. We hear about the people who picked an unlikely winner. This one picked mRNA vaccines. The inventor of MRI scanning had similar problems. He was almost fired. Those two succeeded, eventually. But the people who work on E-beam lithography or vaccines against addiction didn't do so well. Both of those would have been huge if they worked well. You can't tell in advance. If you could, the problem didn't need research.
A more useful way to look at this is that doing it and selling it are different skills. This is why companies have separate R&D, production, and marketing departments. If you face a hard problem in one of those areas, you can't devote enough time to the others. This is to some extent a time management and division of labor problem.
Academia is not team-oriented in that sense. At least below the principal investigator level. Once reaching that level, university PR departments are happy to hype any modest advance into a major breakthrough. Below that level, it's a cold world. Academia seems to have built itself a dysfunctional world - a huge bureaucracy, not much of a career path for real researchers, and a shrinking pool of full professorships. So anybody who is any good goes to a startup now.
Henry Kissinger, who was not lacking in people skills, once commented that "academic policy is so vicious because the stakes are so low".