From wikipedia: >Bell Laboratories was, and is, regarded by many as the premier research facility of its type, developing a wide range of revolutionary technologies, including radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, information theory, the operating system Unix, the programming languages C and C++, solar cells, the CCD, floating-gate MOSFET, and a whole host of optical, wireless and wired communications technologies and systems. Nine Nobel Prizes have been awarded for work completed at Bell Laboratories.
Always the question of money and focus though. IBM has a huge research arm which is doing amazing things, but their impact on the bottom line is perhaps not as strong as Ginny (IBM CEO) would like? At Sun, when Sun Labs was a thing, there were jokes about "Where good ideas go to die." or something along those lines. Commercial interests have a really hard time seeing value in these things when they are done internally.
And for a company that's not a startup, Lockheed Martin has a fusion project.
But what about a commercial "DARPA" ?
I'm guessing that the innovations created by DARPA are a very good ROI in the value sense. If not, what is?
But like Xerox-Parc, the fear is that extracting money from that won't go well.
So one solution is creating a monopoly. But that's not ideal.
But what about some sort of insurance ? How would history look if Xerox-Parc was guarranteed to at-least break even?