How is economic value generated?
In traditional industries such as manufacturing and mining, value is created as an added property to raw materials, such as semiconductors from silicon. Either you create the actual product or you invent the process to create the product, such as inventing the bosh haber process, or sputtering process.
How about in software and data science?
We can think of the the value created by taking raw data and turning it into something people find more valueable, such as payroll systems or operation systems. Similar to the sputtering process, we can also invent new ways to create the product such as the invention of the decision tree algorithm.
As an individual, you choose which path you want to add value. As a scientist/researcher inventing new process, or as an engineer creating the products out of invented processes.