It's weird how much implicit pressure you have to basically start running corporate workshops if you have any sort of socially useful research program.
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Do you want to
a) Go into academia, where your work will generally be looked down upon?
b) Try to help individual clients, who you'll constantly be struggling to find enough of?
c) Play the book author lottery?
d) Earn enough money for the full year in a week of work?
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You can mix and match of course - use corporate money to fund the stuff you think is more worthwhile - but I'm not sure the contrast helps that keep feeling like a good use of your time.
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I suspect the hardest part is not allowing the corporate workshop breadwinning to influence your research program too much. It seems easy to get caught in a "make research better for workshops" -> "give more workshops" -> ... loop that's decoupled from your primary research goal.
I also think that this trap affects businesses that have a SpaceX/Tesla business plan (do the thing so you can do this other thing... 99 steps later... so you accomplish your actual goal). I'm genuinely curious about how SpaceX in particular avoids this.
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I think a certain degree of this is inevitable TBH, and to some degree even desirable. The loop I'm more worried about is more like "I'm making so much money, why do I even need to do research?" and just going in hard on workshop development.
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Nothing wrong with that as long as it's compatible with your terminal goals of course. I'd guess that the "corporate management" answer is to separate the team-that-does-research and the team-that-does-workshop-dev. I have no idea how to scale that down to one person. 🤔