At least in the self-driving car case, it's hard to say they didn't have a big impact. For universities to allow, fund, and support students to form engineering student teams, there usually needs to be some kind of official competition that the team can compete in. In this case, those university teams made major progress on what was at the time seen as an intractable problem. Google and its ilk then headhunted all of the students in the top performing teams to launch their self-driving car division, and now here we are.