Comment by ghaff

Itanium I'd disagree on. It came out academia but Intel and HP really believed for whatever combination of reasons that it was the path forward although the approach had never worked before.

In general, the US probably does a decent job of funding research. Small scale research orgs within companies are often practical. There are company and government grants to both academia and commercial/academic partnerships. VCs, for their faults, do fund pretty speculative work.

For the reasons you say, big corporate research labs require conditions that are mostly not an unalloyed good at best.