[roenxi]

> ...it seems hardly likely that they would have sponsored the years of investment in basic research...

That is the easy part. There is a good model for shared infrastructure - a private corporation is established, all the local companies buy a share then the shared company builds, owns and operates the actual infrastructure. The same thing works for funding long-term research in everyone's best interest. A shared research corporation that all the local businesses can buy into. They can be guilted in to a small contribution and the research can happen at a slow-burn to generate results over time.

To me the bigger challenge is who would pay for dumping large numbers of irradiated bugs.

[pjc50]

But this never happens?

[roenxi]

I didn't come up with the idea, I saw it in action in a mining context.

Besides, how you can be sure it does or doesn't happen? The world is large and complicated; and basic research gets nearly no press and is very hard to statistically quantify. Where would you look for proof in the positive or negative?

[eythian]

Fonterra, New Zealand's largest company runs along these lines. It's a dairy company, so basically gets milk from dairy farmers and puts it on the market. It is a co-op owned by those farmers.

[pnutjam]

My guess is the mining companies do this more for liability then shared cost. I wonder what the churn is in this group of companies?

[Spooky23]

An example in semiconductors would be Sematech.