Ask HN: How do you capitalize on creativity in software development?

Updating my resume today, I got the usual sinking feeling I'd be unable to find a job that makes use of the ‘creative’ aspects of the semi-successful things I’ve built (e.g. abstract visual debugger: https://youtu.be/KwZmAgAuIkY ; this: https://youtu.be/tztmgCcZaM4?t=1m25s). I was asked to meet with a well-known CEO to discuss the future of software interfaces; asked to submit papers to conferences (though I'm not in academia); have ~20,000 hits on youtube project videos—among other things which make it difficult to reconcile the fact I've only been able to find jobs where the prospective employer thinks my software ideas are neat, but once I'm on board it's clear they were only interested in the engineering work.

Strictly engineering is fine, but then I end up feeling guilty that I’m not making any use of abilities that (1) I value highly, and (2) are the only thing other people have considered worthy of sharing links about, blogging about, etc.

Academia seems like a good option in some ways, since my projects tend to overlap with Computer Science research—but I never had good grades, and being a grad student for eight years doesn’t sound very appealing now that I’m 31. And from what I understand, you need to be pretty ‘career-oriented’ if you want a shot at something tenure track, and I’m mostly just interested in ideas.

Doing something entrepreneurial would be sort of ideal, but I’m out of funds and need income. Additionally, I have to limit the amount of time I spend using mouse/keyboard, having run into overuse injuries in the past (so doing this in addition to professional coding work isn’t really an option; and being a diabetic with student loans makes less profitable work more difficult).

The only thing I can see remaining is to do something like R&D for some company, exploring ideas and building prototypes. Is that a thing? How should I pursue it? Are there other options I haven’t considered yet?