Should corporations save the ivory tower?

Unfortunately, the research we see today is of a different nature. In a section titled “Inventions originating from large corporate labs are different”, Arora & Belenzon enumerate the kinds of innovations we’ve lost in the shift towards university labs:

• Corporate labs work on general purpose technologies
• Corporate labs solve practical problems
• Corporate labs are multi-disciplinary and have more resources

Interestingly, the growing unrest within and toward academia appears to have been the hallmark of the corporate world. Do we want corporations to save the ivory tower?