But that isn't the purpose of academia -- the purpose of it is to discover new phenomena not to make products. It is true that there is a lot of work to turn a new advance into a product whether it is software or turning biological knowledge into a drug, but without discovery of new phenomena new products will come to a halt. While it is true that some corporate labs, most famously Bell Labs in its heyday, but also for example IBM's T.J. Watson and Xerox's PARC did do basic research besides product-focused work, this is pretty rare because it is hard to justify the cost of something that may only be practical in decades and often help your competitors as much as yourself.