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.
I can appreciate your point of view very well. I've always found it quite fulfilling and satisfying to solve a problem in our company.
One problem we have is finding partnerships for basic research. We really aren't equipped to do that in house so our logical choice is to partner with a university. THe problem is that our company won't sign their non-disclosure and they won't sign ours. It seems U.S. universities are getting very greedy and want to retain all intellectual property rights and have us pay roayalties to use the work. Most of what we do are in trade secrets or patented ourselves to block competitor use. That puts us in a real bind. Our parent company in Europe doesn't have this problem and have all kinds of joint ventures. Perhaps you could freepmail me with any suggestions of institutes, like yours, that may be able to help us with some basic research needs?