Is it true about the academy?

I have been thinking a lot about a quote from Andrew Grove, one of the founders of Intel, when asked about the academic biomedicine community by Newsweek (full article here: http://www.newsweek.com/id/68221).
Newsweek:"What stands in the way of more and faster success in getting cures to patients?"
Grove:"The peer review system in grant making and in academic advancement has the major disadvantage of creating conformity of thoughts and values. It's a modern equivalent of a Middle Ages guild, where you have to sing a particular way to get grants, promotions and tenure. The pressure to conform [to prevailing ideas of what causes diseases and how best to find treatments for them] means you lose the people who want to get up and go in a different direction. There is no place for the wild ducks. The result is more sameness and less innovation. What we need is a cultural revolution in the research community, academic and non-academic. We need to give wild ducks the opportunity to emerge and quack their way to success. But cultural change can be driven only by action at the top."

Putting aside the "wild duck" metaphor (thank goodness he didn't say "wild turkey"), I found myself chewing on this statement for a couple reasons. When I first read this, I went "YES! Heck yeah, that is my view of academia a lot of the time, and I am living it!". When I tried to articulate why Grove was correct, I found myself doing a lot of typing-erasing-retyping-erasing. Although there is a grain of truth in what Grove is saying, I think there is a lot wrong there too. First, I am not sure the right word is "conformity". Because publishing and grant-getting is all a peer-reviewed process, the prevailing norms and beliefs of the "community" is always brought to bear. And it is the community view that evolves and drives change, through the action of individuals. This seems fundamentally different compared to how innovation might occur in electronics where one doesn't need to publish or get grants at all --- there are simply technical problems and a possible solution and corporate funding to make it happen. Finally, I realized it is facile and just plain wrong to try to compare electronics innovation and biomedical innovation, even when one leaves aside the academy entirely. Just from the standpoint of liability, you design a chip that doesn't work, no one gets hurt. No one sues. You make a medicine that is dangerous to people, different story, right?

Bottom line: Academicians value and engage in rapid innovation as much or more than other segments of our society. Their road to get there requires more effort at the community level to make it happen. More and more, that is being recognized and valued in our endeavors. Individual researchers, professional societies and granting agencies are adapting to this new view of how to "get there" in terms of solving real world problems.