Researchers learn more and more about less and less until they know everything about nothing at all.
There is no one solution to this quandary, but as is so often the case in modern society paring down the bureaucratic nature of the enterprise would be a great start. Famously productive scientific institutions like Bell Labs were based upon funding people, not projects in the main. Identify truly creative individuals and set them free with access to resources.
You will fund lots of dead ends, but also unleash creative energies that might get stifled in a traditional academic setting.
Albert Einsteins great insights were developed not as an academic, but as a low-level staffer at the Swiss Patent Office. Why? Because no academic institution would hire him until he became famous.
There is a lesson to be learned there.
PIF:
"It was killed by the rise of consensus thinking. Out of the box? Pound it down, we have too much vested in our pert theories!"
seowulf:
"Researchers learn more and more about less and less until they know everything about nothing at all."
God:
Genesis 11
4 And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.
5 And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.
6 And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
7 Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.
8 So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.
Game Over. It was time to actually accomplish something.
Identify truly creative individuals and set them free with access to resources.
Religious experts hit hardest..