The difference versus acedemia of old is that science used to be the hobby of rich gentlemen who were under no financial pressures to pay their mortgage and feed their families. Nowadays, I have no doubt everyone is in their field because they love it and want to further it, but if you have to choose between unemployment or taking on projects that you didn't choose most can live with the latter.

So the solution is to somehow decouple it again. Give universities a blank cheque to employ scientists to work on whatever for sciences sake, not for business. Sure, that's obviously open to exploitation in a new way, but we only need one major discovery for the whole thing to be worth it which we can't get with small incremental research.