The issue is that academic research doesn't always translate into a product that can be useful. There are many things that can be done at small scale that look awesome, but once you try to apply it at a larger scale or trying to account for all the corner cases, it starts to fall apart. While this may not be as true for tech, it tends to happen a lot in the physical sciences.

A big recent tech-focused one that started in academia and is now in the hands of large companies is self driving cars. It looks like it may work, but then every started hitting those 1% cases and realized they can't actually ship a fully self driving car (and driver-assist features can lead to worse issues as people think they can trust the tech more than they should).