> spending my time on engineering and research of my own..
In some fields, this is very easy. It's easy to buy a bunch of cluster time on Amazon EC2 or something and run lots of machine learning/other research applications. This is awesome and is one of the great things moving the field forwards.
It is much more difficult in the physical and life sciences where starting out costs are extreme. Many great ideas do not become reality because of how expensive starting a company in those fields are and how difficult it is to raise money in those fields. Lots of VCs are cutting funding in these areas because of the comparatively high risk and pharmaceuticals are slashing R&D budgets in order to pick up smaller companies and secure rights to compounds, etc. Funding is very difficult in these fields and the framework of academia is sometimes the only reasonable way to carry out original research.
In some fields, this is very easy. It's easy to buy a bunch of cluster time on Amazon EC2 or something and run lots of machine learning/other research applications. This is awesome and is one of the great things moving the field forwards.
It is much more difficult in the physical and life sciences where starting out costs are extreme. Many great ideas do not become reality because of how expensive starting a company in those fields are and how difficult it is to raise money in those fields. Lots of VCs are cutting funding in these areas because of the comparatively high risk and pharmaceuticals are slashing R&D budgets in order to pick up smaller companies and secure rights to compounds, etc. Funding is very difficult in these fields and the framework of academia is sometimes the only reasonable way to carry out original research.