The "monastery" could also be run as a business, having a for-profit section developing products based on the ideas produced inside. Something like the members of the monastery signing an agreement that they are ok with their results being published with one year delay, time that would give an edge to the monastery over any competitors that would also want to develop products based on them - think of it like a "research monastery self-financed by coupling with a sort of startup incubator" (with some really intransigent and incorruptible people working to keep the two camps of people apart and to stop the "business idea developers" from exploiting the "monks").
And for research fields that require some expensive equipment, like bio-medical research, the "monastery" may make the "monks" sign contracts giving the patents and other right to their discoveries to the monastery, in exchange for having access to a lab where they can work on anything they want. It's not that utopic since you can a pretty usable top notch molecular biology lab plus an animal experiments facility for under $1M (probably not in the US because you have too many regulations and stuff...) if you find alternative channels of buying equipment of user other "hacks" that regular research institutes can't use...
But it's the kind of idea that it's hard to convince other people it would make sense... so for now I'll keep it on my list of to-dos for after I get filthy rich so I can finance this myself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Advanced_Study
On the other hand, Richard Hamming thinks this model won't work:
> The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn't the way things go. So that is another reason why you find that when you get early recognition it seems to sterilize you. In fact I will give you my favorite quotation of many years. The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, in my opinion, has ruined more good scientists than any institution has created, judged by what they did before they came and judged by what they did after. Not that they weren't good afterwards, but they were superb before they got there and were only good afterwards.
An HN comment with +20 karma was probably read more times than most research papers in journals!
Even outside academics this is true. A great essay, posted as a comment on HN or reddit, is going to be much less circulated than the same essay posted on a blog. E.g. I'll see a good essay on someone's blog and see that it's posted to 12 different subreddits and HN. If I say a great essay as a comment, even if it's of the same quality, I guarantee it will not be posted anywhere else.
www.amazon.com/Anathem-Neal-Stephenson/dp/006147410X/