[t-3]

Corporations and militaries invest large sums, but only to study things that can be exploited for profit or explosions. If you want to study some plant or animal without a known or suspected economic use, good luck. If your field of science doesn't kill people, help targeting rockets, or make bigger booms, good luck. If you want to research in history, humanities, or liberal arts, good luck!

[HWR_14]

Inapplicable research seems to exist at some corporations. I mean they hope that the net results will be profitable, but they're willing to fund a lot of stupid false starts to try to get something interesting.

Bell Labs is the best example, but Xerox PARC. Valve seems to have launched the VR revitalization.

[BirAdam]

A woman I grew up as a neighbor to worked at Proctor and Gamble in a chemical research capacity, and they did random research fairly regularly that was interesting but did not result in productizaton.

Thing is… why wouldn’t we want product-relevant stuff? I mean… hating commerce is definitely a thing around here but the economy equates to the standard of living of humans. The ability to eat healthy foods, and enough to avoid malnutrition; to stay warm in winter and cool in summer (and thereby avoid death); to travel quickly and efficiently for economic, academic, leisure, or other reasons… these are all very important things that result from corporate research. People crap on it, but if any one of these things hadn’t happened half the humans alive today may well have died before age 10.

[colinmhayes]

Why would anyone pay you to research something that isn’t useful to them?

[egypturnash]

Because sometimes when you put a bunch of smart people in one place and let them fuck around with whatever they think is interesting with no regards to obvious, immediate applications, interesting things happen. Some of these interesting things turn into ways to make a shit-ton of money.

Wikipedia's article on Bell Labs has a long list of stuff that came out of it. Some of it's stuff they made money off of, some is stuff other people made money off of. Some of it's stuff other people made money off of that ended up also creating a lot of traffic on Bell's networks.

[t-3]

Exactly my point. Research is not being funded, because money is not interested in science.

[BirAdam]

Every major multinational corporation would disagree with that statement. They care to the extent that their products and profit margins depend on science which is to say: applied science as engineering is precisely what is being sold by them. The vent on your bag of coffee beans flown across the world ona jet, the graphite in your hydraulic brakes on your Tesla automobile or Prius, the computer you’re using that was the result of decades of different companies’ research and development… manufactured goods of any kind are the direct result of scientific advancement, and those companies know it, fund it, and hire from top universities to continue it. They all have R&D. Even Exxon funded research into global warming (tho they did silence the researchers when it turned out their main product was detrimental to all mammals on the planet).