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Nobody pays you in the corporate or startup world if what you do isn’t monetizable, preferably in the short term. And the measure of “awesome” there is how much and how quickly it can be monetized. It seems you haven’t understood the purpose of academia.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs

Bell Labs is not the corporate or startup world, and it was a rather exceptional phenomenon. It also hasn’t produced much significant work anymore in the last twenty years or so.

And Bell Labs existed mainly because of the taxation system of US. They needed to do R&D spend to use as a tax write-off. That's why the most productive years of American tech were the years with highest rates of taxation.

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