On the other hand, lack of some protection against competition, or a reasonable business model, often stop the the serious investment needed to take many products to market.

Maybe an interesting useful compromise, would be to build a patent pool(maybe between universities), where you must contribute any patent you develop, but you can use patents freely for research and small scale commercialization - but in any case of large scale commercialization, you agree to share some reasonable percent of royalties among the relevant patents of that pool , with the amount that goes towards each patent doesn't interefere with your business, and gets settled in a fair, sideway process ?