[barik]

I'll give you a serious response, as explained to me in a recent interview I had for a research scientist position: branding. Some researchers in industry are given fairly wide latitude in the topics that they are allowed to study. In these cases, the company usually gets little direct benefit from the output of the "pet" research idea. For such researchers, their indirect value is the publications and resulting press that hopefully increases the brand of the corporation in a more general sense.

I think it's a fair trade off to have to make if you're considering industrial research. I'd also note that academia isn't much different -- most of those releases also start with something like "MIT researchers..."