It seems like your point is about individual actors within a company, so I'm imagining a software engineer might be promoted to a position where leading development of a game is expected, but they don't have a good idea, so they just do something.

The natural demand for academic research is the dozen or so popular articles every year that get people to subscribe to Science or Nature, plus the two or three popular non-fiction books. You could probably throw some finance newsletters into that mix, as well.