> And most of those R&D shops are attached to companies capable of doing something with the research.
This is false to a surprising degree. Consider that the vast majority of the semiconductor industry cannot "do something with their research". ARM is the oft-repeated example, but what is missed is that they are the norm, not the exception. Consider that the semiconductor industry has thousands of firms and only a handful of fab companies. Without the fabs, these semiconductor companies can do literally nothing, and worse, some fabs like Intel are direct competitors.
This is false to a surprising degree. Consider that the vast majority of the semiconductor industry cannot "do something with their research". ARM is the oft-repeated example, but what is missed is that they are the norm, not the exception. Consider that the semiconductor industry has thousands of firms and only a handful of fab companies. Without the fabs, these semiconductor companies can do literally nothing, and worse, some fabs like Intel are direct competitors.