IMHO the main role of academic engineering research is clear: the training.

Teaching students to become critical research engineers to

- differentiate 1st and 2nd order problems
- differentiate discovery/new ideas from optimization
- take ownership of something important https://twitter.com/DavidHowey/status/1265968706414395392

We faculty get the freedom to posit what might be important, the students are trained rigorously test the hypotheses.

We won the lottery in getting the positions we have, and once in a blue moon an idea or implementation is so robust it gets to leave the lab and make a go of it

But the moment we forget that our main output into this world is engineers is the moment the structure breaks down. When professors sell their ideas as opposed to training student to test and express their ideas is when we enter a BS cycle.

Because so much of what we do is present and fundraise it can be hard to see the forest for the trees. But the moment my students do that thing where the journal title or the funding amount trumps the understanding on a slide is the day I quit, because I done screwed up.