Incremental research is still research. Application research is still research.

The over-emphasis on foundational research from the media & the general public has led to a myopic view of "revolution"-ism, wherein incremental progress in science is considered to be worthless relative to incremental improvements.

The discovery of penicillin was a medical breakthrough, but that doesn't mean that the industrial scale-up of penicillin production was comparatively worthless. In fact, in this specific case, the opposite is true: The benefits of penicillin wouldn't have been received if everyone thought that research into scaling up its production was worthless.