Cyclical economic and government cycle is cyclical
Something that our small government, bullsh*t artist libertarian leaning idiot friends never want to acknowledge is that government backed research is an inevitable driver of progress, not private companies.
Private companies don't and can't truly do new research. There's no better way to disseminate the tech cheaply than privatise it and reward the scientists / technologists but the simple matter is, when our governments are brow beaten into cutting back on universities and fundamental research, we all suffer.
You'll be waiting a long time for our rent seeking corporations to do anything other than establish a rental and then lobby to maintain it, to the point of owning our governments and the public conversation of what government should do. What we truly lack is a proper reset on our public institutions and political process to get it back from being owned by private interests and back into being owned by public interests.