I wish academics were challenged to bring a technology to life. A working gizmo cannot be argued away. We need some mechanism by which the products of research are exposed to reality, a little bit of a market force to help us evaluate what works and what doesn't. Already there is a replication crisis. What we need is to make talk less cheap, ideally give the academics skin in the game. This would be a system where people toil away for years before producing something, and some may never succeed, but when they do they get all the upside from creating a new technology, and we as a society benefit from having this new invention.

Essentially, I would break apart the monolithic idea of academia. There's too many inefficiencies, we waste away the talent of very smart people working on incomprehensible details that only a handful of people care about, and they write papers no one will read, only to then go to finance or tech where they'll wonder what was the point of grad school since a small percentage of their skills/specialized knowledge is necessary to make a living. We're creating all these PhDs and we don't know what to do with them. We need to foster a more entrepreneurial path in these people, they're stuck thinking that they only have two choices: academia or industry.