This is a good reminder, I think, of the benefits of government spending on basic research. The way I look at is that tech companies are mostly bad at research and innovation, because it's expensive and it's often hard to derive revenue from some entirely novel new technology, and there's a big risk of someone coming along and doing it better. (Innovators dilemma and all that.) Tech companies are mostly pretty good at productizing technology, though. At least, they're about as good at it as anyone else. (There are a few well-run non-profit-driven open source projects that make very good products too.)
Good Universities are better at actual innovation and inventing novel technologies, but they usually have little incentive to productize things. Or to put it in different terms, the product is the journal or conference proceeding article, because that's what satisfies the people who write grants.
The grants come mostly from government, which isn't good at innovation or productization, but they know how to pay other people to do those things for them. It's a weird system: government taxes employees and (to a lesser degree) businesses, and then uses that money to pay University researchers to invent things that are eventually used in the private sector as the foundation of some new commercial product.
Is there a more efficient way to do this? Probably. We could have more government funding to Universities directly for productization of their research, or give out a lot of grants to individual people who are just maintaining open source projects or making/maintaining something similar that many people benefit from but the value would be lost if one were to try to make money off of it. We could also give taxpayers some say in how the basic research portion of their taxes is spent.
> or give out a lot of grants to individual people who are just maintaining open source projects or making/maintaining something similar that many people benefit from but the value would be lost if one were to try to make money off of it.
There is definitely a lot of missed opportunity in not supporting some open source projects that provide general public benefit.
Some of those products would compete with parts of the services Google and co offer.
Good Universities are better at actual innovation and inventing novel technologies, but they usually have little incentive to productize things. Or to put it in different terms, the product is the journal or conference proceeding article, because that's what satisfies the people who write grants.
The grants come mostly from government, which isn't good at innovation or productization, but they know how to pay other people to do those things for them. It's a weird system: government taxes employees and (to a lesser degree) businesses, and then uses that money to pay University researchers to invent things that are eventually used in the private sector as the foundation of some new commercial product.
Is there a more efficient way to do this? Probably. We could have more government funding to Universities directly for productization of their research, or give out a lot of grants to individual people who are just maintaining open source projects or making/maintaining something similar that many people benefit from but the value would be lost if one were to try to make money off of it. We could also give taxpayers some say in how the basic research portion of their taxes is spent.