I think it's more correct to say that in almost all cases, the purpose of academic research is to advance human knowledge, not produce a commercial product. Aca

I think it's more correct to say that in almost all cases, the purpose of academic research is to advance human knowledge, not produce a commercial product. Academia is not industry, nor should it be. What drives an academic scientist is the pursuit of knowledge, the recognition from peers that he/she was the one who formulated the new theorem, found the new approach. Going from proof of concept to polished product is not academically interesting and, as pointed out, not valuable to the degree granting or tenure process. Many universities realize that there may be valuable technologies that need to be extracted and developed. Business schools try to match MBA students with Engineering students, offices of tech transfer try to offer some support in this area as well. Schools are offering specific advanced programs in commercialization of academic research (e.g. Notre Dame's ESTEEM program http://esteem.nd.edu/ http://esteem.nd.edu/). Even some companies are trying to help this process, like TandemLaunch (http://www.tandemlaunchtech.com/ http://www.tandemlaunchtech.com/).