Perhaps, it has something to do with the high failure rate of such research. Would you pay a salary to 1000 employees, of which only one employee gives you solid results and the remaining fail?
>implying that this is bad
Typical bean-counter/MBA attitude.
That's not very business friendly.
Companies like HP, Xerox, etc, built empires on that kind of research.
They declined when they spun off or closed their research divisions because management failed to see the value/use the output of the research labs. The HP example is particularly striking - they went from an advanced technology company to a schlock printer seller, one that is sneered at and loathed, in a handful of years. Xerox is also striking in that PARC laid the foundation for a lot of modern computing but management only saw money to be made in copiers and filing paper and thusly ignored most of PARC's output, ceding the computer revolution to other companies.
It is also part of a larger problem. Because of the emphasis on short-term profits (quarters are too long!) at the expense of everything else, we in the West are so enthusiastic at shoving all our production to the Chinese and others saying "We can't be arsed to get our hands dirty; we want to just do the high-level stuff like design and company management" totally ignoring the fact where the production goes, so does the engineering development, science research, and eventually even upper-management. This was learned by Samuel Slater, Francis Cabot Lowell, and others who founded the "silicon valley" (Blackstone Valley) of the Industrial Revolution. A lesson forgotten through complacency, greed, and snobbery.
Alexander Graham Bell is shouting at you from his grave calling you a moron.
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BMO
