Because in Europe the belief that important and wide research should be carried out by "public" research is much stronger than, say, USA. Also while we have seen a somewhat invading process of privatisations ( :( ), European universities are still largely owned publicly and financed via public funding, therefore most [public] moeny for research should and will be directed to them for the time being.

You could then argue that it's not as efficient as the VC model, but:

- I haven't seen any study confirming such thing

- It doesn't seem easy to achieve a reasonable compromise between open research and R&D protectionism unless you are a big company

- Academia, even with all its politics and problems, is still a fast and active environment for scientific research

EDIT: typesetting