The trick is, academics often have excess manpower capacity in the form of grad students and post-docs. Even though personell is usually one of the highest expenses on any given grant, they often don't look at ways to improve the efficiency of their research man-hours.
That's not a blank rule, as we have definitely had success with the value proposition of research efficiency, but in general, a lot of things business adopt to improve project time (like Theory of Constraints project management, Mindset/Skillset/Toolset matching of personel et) is of no interest to academic researchers.
