[msutherl]

This is simply not true except perhaps in that any research center will have an aggregate ROI counter that some bureaucrats glance at annually. As somebody pointed out elsewhere, Bell Labs' ROI was capped. Much, and I would argue the best, corporate research is done with almost no consequential oversight from the host corporation. This was certainly the case with Bell Labs, XEROX Parc, and other great research centers of yore just as it is still the case to some extent at Microsoft, AT&T, IBM, and Intel today (between re-orgs).

At present, PARC (no longer under Xerox) operates on something of an agency model and Google runs research projects like startups. This appears to result in a higher rate of short-term commercial success, but at the cost of fundamental research. That said, I think we've done a tremendous amount of fundamental research since World War II and now that the conditions for producing more no longer exist, there's plenty of low-hanging fruit – new configurations of things that already exist – hence the prevalence of startups and the perceived excellence of hybrid research models.