You most probably can't. The reason is that private corporations have a very short-term outlook and are (understandably) looking for short-term returns.
Academics aren't incentivized by ROI. Instead, they want intellectual distinction and recognition, and pursue problems if they are perceived to be intellectually curious or may have a large impact on society.
Sometimes the actual work that is being done can overlap, but underneath the motivations are completely different, and each have their own pros and cons. We need both.
+ The founders retain a lot of control via the company stock structure, are nerds, and seemingly want to recreate a Bell Labs style culture. + Doing crazy science keeps up their brand as a tech thought leader current, even though 95% of their revenue comes from a pretty simple set of products that about 20 years old. This helps them recruit the best and brightest.
Doing this kind of research also gives them a plausible potential growth story to sell to the Street. So it's not that commerce doesn't cross their mind, but it's not in the short-term sense that a lot of people think of it as. I'm not opposed to university research, I just think people underweight the corporate side's contributions.
This plays out plenty at Google. They make a big splash investing in a speculative technology, devote a huge team to it for a year or two, then dump it to move on to the next big thing. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, but it's not the same as academia.
Google may be top “freedom of research” today but it’s a private property I have no influence or stake whatsoever; one day they take a u-turn and “spring clean” all.
I can’t trust a couple guys just because “they’re nerds”, that’s not a long enough guarantee. You actually used Bell Labs as an example... is it still as prominent today as it was? Why not?
State universities are great, but they're not where the lion's share of Nobel-caliber research is done. In the US, Private schools lead 10:1 in the Nobel race: (https://www.bestmastersprograms.org/50-universities-with-the...).
Exactly! That's why we need to nationalize the Ivy League.
Let me break to you the hard news: As a citizen you have basically zero influence over the research direction that the government TLAs engage in. Those decisions are made through elections which are determined by things like "who can we scare into thinking they'll cause abortions to happen across the land". If a candidate who had a proven track record of funding science wrote the Patriot act, you wouldn't vote for him, would you? (True story). It's even worse in the EU, since the commissioners are not elected. Oh and the kicker is that in the past three decades, those people who hate abortions and deny global warming have a better track record of funding science than the other tribe.
If you really want to have agency, you would be donating to a nonprofit science research organization.
I don’t think there’s a solution that doesn’t include reevaluating the idea of public commons, in a world without there’s absolutely no reason to spend a dime outside of corporate subsidy
I once worked on a Google R&D project that got well-known in some circles. Google cut the funding without warning and I eventually had to find a new job.
They do have basic research too, into topics that Google or SpaceX wouldn't do (see eg. http://math.mit.edu/research/pure/index.php)
I'm not sure if the difference is meaningful, there's essential applied research too that private companies wouldn't do. Like cosmology.
It's hard to see how we would have gotten quantum computers without decades of enormous public budgets for basically aimless basic research.
Before that: Xerox and AT&T. Google did too at first with their car are robotics venture s.
Admittedly sparse pickings...
Still, as far as I know, neither MS nor IBM funds truly basic research without considering some kind of potential return.
On the other hand, the NSF doesn't consider ROI at all because it's funded by us taxpayers.