The environment you describe is self-destructive, which is why it is rare throughout history.
Xerox PARC did it, and reaped almost none of the rewards for their innovation, so it perished. It only worked for Bell Labs because they had monopolistic control of telephony and could charge whatever they liked to subsidize their R&D. As soon as they lost the monopoly, it went down hill fast. Google is the closest thing to this in the past couple decades, and have seen all their investments in AI walk out the door to found competitors.
Bottom line, pouring enormous amounts of money into pure research without demanding commercialization results certainly benefits researchers (who can pick up and take their research elsewhere) but runs companies into the ground.
Xerox PARC did it, and reaped almost none of the rewards for their innovation, so it perished. It only worked for Bell Labs because they had monopolistic control of telephony and could charge whatever they liked to subsidize their R&D. As soon as they lost the monopoly, it went down hill fast. Google is the closest thing to this in the past couple decades, and have seen all their investments in AI walk out the door to found competitors.
Bottom line, pouring enormous amounts of money into pure research without demanding commercialization results certainly benefits researchers (who can pick up and take their research elsewhere) but runs companies into the ground.