Eh, there's a balance to be struck, and that's obvious to anyone that's seriously thought about this issue. There's no shortage of specious ideas. From outrig

Eh, there's a balance to be struck, and that's obvious to anyone that's seriously thought about this issue. There's no shortage of specious ideas. From outright quackery, the naive, or the simply misguided, there are countless ways to waste a lot of time and money on ideas that will lead nowhere. Especially when all you're guided by is intuition. That's not to say that intuition isn't valuable; rather, intuition shouldn't be the only guiding principle. If an idea is 'real' in the sense that it will produce substantive research findings, it's reasonable to expect some kind of evidence for this. Maybe you're trying to show that A -> D. Well, showing a bit about B or C can go a long way to convincing people it's worth looking at the link between A and D. The counter-argument is that it's possible there is not B or C, that a large and courageous leap is required to get to D. That's indeed possible, and arguably has been demonstrated with some famous results. But it doesn't follow that you simply must take everyone's giant leaps seriously and give them funding. Ultimately, we go by proxies. If A -> D is required, well, at least show us that you got from A to B in some other issue. Give us evidence, however imprecise, that you might be that 1 in a 1,000 (or 1,000,000?) leaper that lands somewhere successfully. So yes, there's an art to knowing when an idea is 'ripe' for a wider audience, and when it's time to stake your career on it. There's no reason you can't work on something in the background or during a sabbatical. The notion that 'academic incrementalism' is so destructive is a tenuous one, and certainly isn't being demonstrated here. To argue this is to say that Dixon would have been successful, if only he had gotten this or that position. Yet is appears that his approach was the issue, not financial or departmental support. I'd argue that the academic system correctly identified that his idea wasn't ready yet. Now that some demonstrable progress is being made, even if it falls far short of 'D', it's attracting attention and enthusiasm. Finally, the notion that academia produces no actual research is farcical.