Look at Edison Labs, the Xerox PARC, Bell Labs...Do you actually believe that wall st today would support these kinds of long-term research projects, or shitcan them so fast it'd give a snowball in hell whiplash after they refused to promise "new deliverables that increase synergy and shareholder value" in time for the quarterly report?
Would they? They do! Examine the screen of your smartphone — is it not drastically better, than what was available 15 years ago? How much is Intel spending on further reducing the element sizes of their chips? Companies are doing the research — including long-term research — that they think, they need. That some people disagree with their opinion on what ought to be researched, that's a different story.
There are two other problems, that might be contributing to the problem you are talking about — not that we have any way of measuring anything. First is with the public's attitude — so often demonstrated on this very web-site — towards intellectual property in general and patents in particular. A lot of people believe, intellectual property — be it blueprints for some gizmo, or a dress-design, or a song, or a video-compression algorithm — is an "evil" concept, that, quite paradoxically, only cripples innovation.
People claiming: "Wait a minute! That was my idea!!" are immediately dismissed as "patent trolls" until proven otherwise — and those, who purchased an idea from the original inventor are almost never able to do the proving (not in the court of public opinion anyway) — an unfortunate state of affairs, that puts a heavy discount on active methodical research (though spontaneous innovations can still occur, of course). This removes the incentive from spending on research — you spend real tangible dollars, but the result is something, that can be stolen by others, who will not even risk being labeled (much less prosecuted) as thieves.
And the second problem is the research done by tax-funded universities. The corporations — as well as you and me — are taxed (and rather heavily) and then not us, and not the corporations, but "wise" men decide, how to spend that money. And on the occasion such public grants do result in a useful invention, the hitherto publicly-funded scientists open up their own company to exploit it...
We get the worst of both worlds: unlike a Socialist country, we don't get to force these public servants to share their invention with the rest of us, but, unlike a Capitalist country, we were forced to pay them and are still forced to pay others like them. And, to put us back on topic, none of that research counts as "corporate" leading the short-sighted public to accuse the (invariably "evil") corporations of being myopic themselves.