In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Thomas Edison proved a new model: the corporate research lab. Inside the two-story shed he built in Menlo Park, New Jersey, Edison oversaw a team of “muckers”—his term for professional experimenters—who fleshed out his sketches and helped him invent, among other things, the incandescent lightbulb and the first instruments for recording sound and video. Edison’s team-based success became too obvious to ignore, and other companies copied him, with magical results. In the 1930s, DuPont’s Experimental Station developed synthetic rubber, nylon, and Kevlar.
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None of these were the kind of out of the box thinking you describe and making science corporate disincentivizes innovation
