If you're not already familiar, you might be interested in the Long Now. "The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide a counterpoint to today's accelerating culture and help make long-term thinking more common. We hope to creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years."

http://longnow.org/

And on the other hand we have the public companies, lacking strong leadership, forced to look at quarterly returns.

Well there are more research institutions competing for the same dollars so the only way they can differentiate is based on publications. A lot of science is derivative and collaborative. Most important though it needs to be reproducible. Starting there is priority #1.

Is _top_ university an important distinction in this context?

It was just to highlight that things are broken even at the top. I've worked all the way from a relatively small institution and I've found little correlation between long term vision and institution ranking, which is quite surprising.

It actually is in my opinion. If the top, elite research institutes show these kind of problem, then we can expect it to be very prevalent in the rest of the field as well. As in, this isn't some no name low tier school run by mediocre people.

Actually, I’d say it’s the opposite.

"Top" "Elite" universities are usually optimized for their metric – which is the Shanghai index, which is based on number of publications in english-language magazines.

In countries outside of the Anglosphere often research at universities can go a lot slower, as they have no chance in the Shanghai index anyway.

The Fraunhofer institute has, in cooperation with Sony, VW and Mercedes, worked on self driving cars since 2002. Sometimes you just have to throw a few million euro and a few decades onto a project to get some results.

Implication is competition is paramount - both level and quality of output