[tpmoney]

Probably in large part because when you're no longer a monopoloy, you can't soak the consumer for enough extra margin to spend many person years of time and money going nowhere most of the time.

That's putting it harshly of course, but it's probably notable that the only places you might find something approaching a team or department like the Bell Labs of old are large incumbents in fields like Apple or Microsoft. If you're a smaller competitor or in a highly competitive space, you don't have the luxury of being able to spend large chunks of money and people on R&D that may never produce anything useful or salable. In theory you might be able to get something like this out of academia, but then you run into the publish or perish mindsets.

I wonder if one way the states and federal government could encourage development in towns and areas that are dying as the world consolidates and small towns lack opportunity would be to subsidize these sorts of non-competitive R&D spaces in those otherwise undesirable living areas. A sort of multi pronged subsidy, to both the workers (discounted home loans, dedicated public transport), to the local industries (grants or loans to builders in the area to build homes and infrastructure) and to the companies themselves (tax incentives, short term subsidizing of salaries etc), and in exchange the public and the government gets the results of the research perhaps under reduced term patents or special licensing deals.