That's a strong claim. While I'm sure the sentiment is understandable for some fields of academia, others have produced significant results that have been adopt

That's a strong claim. While I'm sure the sentiment is understandable for some fields of academia, others have produced significant results that have been adopted by the industry, sometimes very quickly. Machine Learning has a lot of theoretical results produced by academia, but the more practical techniques (decision trees, SVMs, neural networks, etc) also all came from academia. The engineers scaled the algorithms to run on bigger datasets, but the initial work is still driving those systems. Graphics research has seen comparable contributions between industrial research labs and academia. Sure, a higher proportion of papers from academia don't end up practical, but the number of papers that are very practical makes that quite irrelevant. It's to be expected since you can't predict what works in advance, and industrial research labs just don't bother publishing negative results, not that they don't get any. Many programming languages and compiler techniques came from papers. I could go on but you see the point - it depends on the field.