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.
This would be terrible for research. You would be throwing away so-called pure endeavours. Where would pure math fit in your vision? Homotopy Type Theory would be a no-go for instance.
Market forces are not and can't be the start and end of how resources are allocated, especially in academia/research. You would be stiffling that which does not seem to yield immediate, visible results (profit). Except that's what research does. It's why it's called research.
Math can continue its current structure because as far as I know there is no reproducibility crisis in it, it's all supposed to be logical proofs that should stand by themselves.
My idea would be for the experimentalists, give them the opportunity to tinker and trial and error without the bs pressures of publish or perish, and/or crotchety advisors.
I just want the academic to be exposed a little bit to something from reality that can give them feedback, market forces is what came to mind because the introductions of so many papers talk about the potential applications of their niche research, but you never see anyone actually do the application. So how about they give that a shot? Let's put the models to the test and see if they can build something. That is in my opinion a much better approach at evaluating what can be reproduced. If they build something and did so without their academic models, well, then now we need theoreticians to figure out what's going on there. To me this seems a more organic approach, where the direction of research is being led by stochastic discoveries fueled by an acceptance of the risks of trial and error. The top-down, directed research approach we have is hard to stomach with inherently biased people at the top, and this type of system will only change its preferences on research directions one funeral at a time. That's a lot of time to waste for many many 20 - 30 year olds that have ideas but don't have a fighting chance to try.
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.