It has been said that 80% of the scientific and technical knowledge out there is in patents, not journals. I've been in academic and industrial circles and there is a very big difference between them. Two of my pet peeves are 1) seeing so-called "new" research that is really a repeat of work done in the '50s or 60's because the electronic jounrals don't go back that far and grad students are too lazy to pick up the print version of Chemical Abstracts and 2) esoteric academic work that hovers around the periphery of some major field but has no direct impact. The problem with grant agencies (and I am guessing that's where your beef is) has to do with the politics behind the science. I can remembered being lectured by colleagues about what buzz words you needed to include just to hpe to get funding. It turned into a grant writing game and I hated it. Now that I'm in the private sector, I've seen and done a lot of exciting things but just can't talk about them. At some conferences, I've even seen challeneges presented that we solved years ago. There really is a lot in the labs of privaate industry, but we do depend on university research to do the kinds of work we cannot directly invest in. What would be your suggestion for funding and/or directing non-private sector work?
Actuallly I made a number of suggestions in the book, but I'm not "fixated" on any of them. My main point is that we've tried government funding and it has made things worse, not better. We need to look for other alternatives.
I spent 18 years working in a university research institute. Much different from faculty research. No "publish or perish." Instead, it was "satisfy the client," and most of the clients were in industry. We did have some government clients, but they were all mission-oriented agencies: Air Force, FAA, etc. They weren't supporting basic research as such, they were buying basic research they needed to solve their problems.
In general, we were very unsuccessful in getting support from NSF and similar "research" agencies. We didn't play the games they wanted us to play. We were looking for research that would solve somebody's problems. We did much better in getting support from industry, because we focused on their problems regardless of whether it led to a journal article.
Even so, I've got a couple dozen journal articles and several books to my credit. But they were sort of byproducts of research I undertook for other reasons, not the main objective.