>Your incentive would be that your product is better and sells more

I'm curious if you ever tried to sell anything in large volumes. You can invent a brilliant thing but still have hard times selling it because of a lack of resources for marketing and a lack of established sales channels. At the same time, big resourceful corporations just steal you invention and resell it to existing customer base, use huge marketing resources, benefit from brand awareness, etc.

Inventing something better doesn't automatically guarantee you a solid revenue stream. Monetizing good inventions for a small company is a way less trivial task than it might seem.