[ants_everywhere]

This is like the nursery rhyme version of economics we tell to freshmen. The truth is pretty far from this.

My personal take is that in practice most of the innovation we see in tech comes from the universities. E.g. the tech in search engines, smart phones, the internet, LLMs and AI etc.

The tech is then, in practice, given to the private sector. There the profit motive is used to commercialize rather than innovate.

Commercialization does often require some innovation around the edges, which companies often get by hiring talent from academia.

I realize this is unlikely to be a super popular opinion for some HN readers. But to me it's the one most defensible by evidence.

[phpisthebest]

>>The tech is then, in practice, given to the private sector.

100% false, normally the people that created the tech while in university are the ones that create the business using the test (see facebook, google, etc), it is their tech to begin with it was not given to them

In most cases the University is also either paid a fee, or is part owner in the company as a startup, cashing out when funding starts.

Nothing is "given away"

now I personally think anything developed using Government Grants should be Public domain, non-patentable, non-copyright, 100% public domain, but ....

[ants_everywhere]

The technologies I mentioned were all developed by dozens or hundreds of people over the course of decades. Statistically, P(you become a founder | you helped invent the tech) is basically 0. Although you are probably right that P(you helped invent the tech | you are a founder) may be nonzero.

[kriops]

"(...) nursery rhyme (...)" is a nice way of not addressing what was said. Good for you.

Yes, a lot of discoveries (not "most innovation", but besides the point!) happens at Universities. But so what? Universities are either for-profit themselves, or they are financed through taxes which depends on the profitability of businesses in the economy which they exist in and contribute to. And like a sibling comment pointed out: Researchers are often the ones commercializing a discovery. Moreover, I specifically stated that "[the commercializing actor] makes technology accessible at scale."

Your statement that "the profit motive is used to commercialize rather than innovate" is a half-truth, because the profit motive is very much present once you consider more than the first-order effects.

I 100% agree that commercialization of new techology (again, innovation is a lot more than bleeding-edge research) e.g., search engines, smart phones, the internet, LLMs and AI, is optimally done through some kind of interaction between univiersities and commercial actors – but to the mutual benefit of a spiderweb of stakeholders affiliated with both academia and commercial actors, and not some quasi-altruistic act of sacrifice on the part of the university.