Academia vs Industry Research

Universities don't do research. Individuals affiliated with the university do. The usual deal is that the individuals own the results. If they want to commercialize the results, then the university (and possibly the funders) get a share. But the vast majority of academics don't do that, because commercialization attempts mean certain bureaucracy and uncertain gains. Most just want to talk about their results freely. Many even talk about preliminary work and preliminary results openly t

why aren't they a research institution then? We live in a funny world where academia is ridden with paper mills and fail to do its job, and a for profit company like Google is doing academia's job and... fail to do its job on applications and commercialization also.

I always felt universities should have been the ones to take on the roles similar to bell labs. They receive government funding and are focused on fundamental scientific research. Now it seems most academics are (understandably) preoccupied with publications and, in computer science at least, breakthrough deep learning research is from rich tech companies like Google and Facebook. I wonder what happened.

This seems on topic: https://www8.gsb.columbia.edu/newsroom/newsn/10721/the-color...

I'm not sure how true that is for sectors other than software/AI, but in AI most academic researcher complain that all the moonshot research (often not even commercially applicable) is now solely coming from corporate research labs e.g. Deepmind, Facebook etc., as opposed to universities. They attribute this to poaching of faculty by companies, lack of resources in universities, lack of motivation in grad students to stay in academia.

Huh?There is sometimes external funding from industry towards academia with a concrete research and there is internal (taxpayer/internal money) funding in academia. Both are not handed out freely.There is basic research, not tied to any concrete practical problem, but there never is random research. Professors have some freedom, but have to answer. The type of academia you describe only exists as a wanted Utopia, not as reality.

academia was meant to protect researchers from profit incentives that bias their work in private companies, if you replace those with other corrupt incentives then what's the point? you could just do that shoddy, useless research in industry and not publish it.

I think the academic system is changing. There’s a bunch of reasons why but one of them is that funding does oscillate between industry and academia for r&d but usually not this quickly. But also, simply put, academia has been overtaken by a lot of waste in the bureaucracy that limits and stifles innovation. Grants that are applied for and won by academic researchers that then lose half their value to the nebulous overhead causes harm. university wide partnerships with industry suppliers suc

You are saying that the risks of industry interests have not come true. There has been much talk about companies trying to influence what products are being used in education, which for universities, is closely related to research. Even if we assume this to be true a risk that has not happened (much) is by no means guaranteed to not happen in the near future.Also the examples that you name "bandwidth compression, codecs, recommender systems, crytocurrency" are really quite sexy. The

Universities are incentivized to research things that will score grant money.