That is blamed for some of the problems with tech in Canada and anecdotally, the government money drives a lot of strange behaviour.

https://alexdanco.com/2021/01/11/why-the-canadian-tech-scene...

Anecdata: I work at a uk startup and quite a lot of our product development has been funded by HMG. It’s worked really well for helping us work through technical challenges and has enabled us to reach product/market fit for our key products.

the paper is focusing on experimentation in the context of commercial startups, but arguably more high-risk and potentially high-utility experimentation may happen in other contexts, such as universities, that tend to be largely government funded.

consider silicon valley. government allocates funding for long-term high risk research programs toward various defence objectives. this funds fundamental research in universities.

some researchers then spin off startups to develop products for defence applications -- so the government takes the risk to fund any long-term blue-sky research and then is also willing to as the first customer and provider of contracts for any startups that figure out how to industrialise/commercialise the research for defence applications (electronic warfare...).

see e.g. https://steveblank.com/secret-history/

similarly, consider the development of tcp/ip. pretty handy thing. no startup managed to capture the rights to tcp/ip and change rent to all users of the internet, so arguably from the perspective of commercial startups tcp/ip is a failure.

Based on your personal observation or some reading? If the later, can you point me to some sources?

Yes. The internet for one. Thats kind of the big one thats easy to point to. Other things like infrastructure is often over looked. The Hoover Damn provided so much power.