That's kind of the whole point of specialization - a good framework to look at this is the Technology Readiness Level principles; and different institutions are

That's kind of the whole point of specialization - a good framework to look at this is the Technology Readiness Level principles; and different institutions are specialized to work with different maturity levels of a tech and that's ok. The requirements to work on core principles that might have an application (and fund&organize that work) are fundamentally different from finding product/market fit for something that's known to be possible and are fundamentally different from optimizing a process for making that thing 1% cheaper than last year, so those are generally done by different institutions and different people. So yes, from the point of someone doing fundamental research, once a proof of concept exists, their part of the work is done - there's a lot of further steps to get that to a commercially viable product, but those steps should be done by someone else who's better at it and whose organization is structured completely differently to facilitate this completely different process. And meanwhile they'll working on some other tech that's ready for that engineering stage yet. Theoretical physics isn't applied physics isn't prototype engineering isn't process optimization engineering. You need people and organizations working on every TRL step, and they aren't interchangeable, you need the preceding step well-funded to make your work possible and you need to move the results to the following steps since those will harvest the actual end-user value in the end.