As someone inside academic science, I think the only good thing it does is give people a place to think for a few years with relatively few distractions before they can go into industry or form a startup and actually get things done.

If you want to consider a problem in great depth before launching a startup to attack it, definitely go to grad school and do science for 4-5 years. If you think you have a good idea forget about grad school and just launch. (Obviously doesn't apply to things like bio where you need a lot of equipment, but as DIY science becomes more tractable this will go away.)