Microsoft, for one, invests truly staggering amounts of money in basic research. So does the American defense industry -- for entirely different scales of "staggering".
Freeing the research from academic domination will lead to immense advance in our knowledge. Wikipedia showed that freeing the organization of the known knowledge from the monopoly of the academic middlemen is a good thing. Let's do the same for the unknown knowledge. A research factory employing a huge number of unskilled workers trained to do one thing well (instead of an unnecessary and long academic education) will solve research problems faster and cheaper. Let's eliminate the middlemen in research.
I wrote about this research factory here.