Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure how many, if any, are doing blue sky research (vs product-directed "research") any more the way that Bell Labs, IBM Watson and Xerox Parc used to do. Look at what's going on with ML/AI - DeepMind now merged with Google Brain seemingly with a product focus, FAIR now moved into a product group alongside Meta's GenAI group, Microsoft essentially outsourcing AI to OpenAI, OpenAI may as well call itself GPTCo…
The reason Bell Telephone built that organization is that they had a government-sanctioned monopoly on local phone service, and to justify the continuation of this, they wanted to find ways to show they were contributing to society. Could someone like Google or Microsoft build a Bell Labs today? Yes, almost certainly, but there's no financial incentive to do so. And the shareholders would not be pleased if you told t…
In my opinion, professors at research universities have to contend with the pressures of raising grant money in a competitive environment combined with "publish or perish" pressures. Even post-tenure there are ways universities could punish "non-productive" faculty members at institutions where professors are regularly expected to publish at top journals/conferences and raise grant money. It's not that much different from the pressure their corporate research counterparts face, where they have to regularly justify their employment by producing a regular flow of research results that have business impact. This pressure to produce results on a regular schedule, whether in industry or in academia, is something that I strongly believe stifles science and forces scientists to make evolutionary "sure bets" instead of working on riskier, more revolutionary projects like the ones that Bell Labs and Xerox PARC researchers got to work on during those labs' heydays.
Alan Kay, who worked at Xerox PARC in the 1970s, has a lot to say about supporting long-term, revolutionary research here (http://worrydream.com/2017-12-30-alan/).
In my opinion, the simple answer is that we need institutions that provide researchers the freedom and space to work on riskier, longer-term projects, and we also need funding to support such research.
For my personal career, I'm reminded of this quote from physicist J. J. Thomson made over a century ago:
"Granting the importance of this pioneering research, how can it best be promoted? The method of direct endowment will not work, for if you pay a man a salary for doing research, he and you will want to have something to point to at the end of the year to show that the money has not been wasted. In promising work of the highest class, however, results do not come in this regular fashion, in fact years may pass without any tangible results being obtained, and the position of the paid worker would be very embarrassing and he would naturally take to work on a lower, or at any rate a different plane where he could be sure of getting year by year tangible results which would justify his salary. The position is this: You want this kind of research, but, if you pay a man to do it, it will drive him to research of a different kind. The only thing to do is to pay him for doing something else and give him enough leisure to do research for the love of it." (from https://archive.org/details/b29932208/page/198/mode/2up).
My career goal is to find a way to make a living outside of research that provides me enough time to do the research I want to do. This way I'm free from the pressures of either "publish or perish" from academia or "profit or perish" from industry.