Contrary to poular belief, there IS a way to be credibly involved in the idea economy if you don't like implementation (I include academic basic research and marketing for specific products as a hustler in the implementation game).

This is the contextualization economy. Implementation takes ideas forward. Contextualization takes ideas backwards and sideways by rooting them in historical context. Most implementation types suck at it, but the smarter ones realize they need it, which is why there IS demand for such _situated_ ideas. Ideas that come with a carefully argued historical backstory, structural models etc. Ideas floating in mid-air are useless to the implementation economy, but situated, contextualized ideas can be valuable.

Two examples: Eli Goldratt's book, "The Goal" strongly inspired i2, and Malone's work on the "future of work" inspired elance. Both happened to be academics, but their influence did not play out via their actual academic work.

That path of influence is open to all. Academics merely supply ideas with an academic context. Others supply other kinds. Sci-fi writers provide what-if type contexts. Good business writers supply economic context, like Nick Carr in his IT Doesn't Matter article/book.

Plenty of examples abound. The key is that there is serious hard work involved in turning a free-floating idea into some sort of contextualized idea. So much so, that when you're done, the idea will seem like a footnote. Sometimes you'll want to drop the idea altogether and supply context for an entire class of ideas.

I don't mind implementation and have one quite a bit of it, but increasingly I am part of this contextualization economy and make most of my money from it. I've even had a couple of people tell me something I wrote inspired their startup idea (I haven't made any money off these people though, since they mostly don't have any money, but there is good money in less flattering kinds of attention that requires somewhat more commodity/gruntwork type idea-engineering work).

Contextualization in a way is "intellectual implementation."

You will find in these cases that the idea itself is secondary