I think the corporate world is still learning how to do effective research. Too many companies think that doing research means replicating a tiny university wit

I think the corporate world is still learning how to do effective research. Too many companies think that doing research means replicating a tiny university within their own walls. I'm not saying industry always gets it more right than academia, but I think even the orgs like Microsoft Research that are basically just clones of academia, are still on a slightly better path. For instance MSR has done a lot of cutting edge research into operating system design. Still, the money was in the end wasted - nothing of Midori ever surfaced in real products. The gold standard for me is Google. They're one of the few firms that managed to completely fuse research and industrialisation into a totally cohesive whole. Whilst they technically speaking have a research department, the research they're known for is largely not done there and Google has managed in the past to routinely create new innovations from all over the company. It's worth realising that a lot of industrial and corporate research isn't labelled as such. It's just "innovative product development". Example: If we look at JetBrains, they developed a new programming language from scratch (Kotlin) that has several innovative and cutting edge features. Do we think of JetBrains as a sponsor of research or Kotlin as the product of research, probably not, yet it solves many problems that were previously unresolved, like how to make a new language that has seamless interop with Java, and how to improve the usability of features like generics and nullity checking. The work involved in creating it explored new frontiers that academia has ignored, simply because usability improvements and practical topics like interop with existing code is not considered 'smart' enough to be worth the title of research. You see this pattern crop up repeatedly. Academia, left to its own devices, researches ever more exotic extensions to Haskell, knowing full well most programmers don't use Haskell. The corporate funded academic research done by JKU Linz and Oracle has focused on how to make existing languages like Ruby and Python super fast to execute, super debuggable, cheap to develop runtimes for, how to solve the language interop problem once and for all and so on. They've produced something real - Graal - which looks on track to actually let Ruby call into C++ call into Java call into JavaScript call back into Ruby again, in a seamless and fully optimised manner. Now that is cutting edge but incredibly practical research that could have industry-shaking impact within the next 10 years. It isn't primarily funded by the NSF or EU though. It's funded by a corporation.