I am also interested in research work rather than actually delivering something productively. Even though I am a business owner and also a senior developer I ha

I am also interested in research work rather than actually delivering something productively. Even though I am a business owner and also a senior developer I hardly get time to be able to perform any research. The only time I am able to convince my stakeholders for getting some research time is while we are working on a new service design. For e.g. recently our business wanted to start a Kubernetes related service offering to our clients. I was able to spend some time and money in doing that as a result, we were able to design a useful service for our clients which is what they were looking for. My suggestion for you is that although you are having a good depth of academic knowledge you have to work on some real-world problems. You can get to start with research work but for that, you have to first do the real world stuff. As you grow in your career, your organization will rely more on your research. Another option could be to start delivering video courses on your researches and develop proof of concepts, which can be an awesome start of an open source journey. All the best!