You think I’m ignoring incentives yet my entire argument was based on incentives. People are experiencing problems in their daily lives. They know of under-funded research that can solve their problems. They don’t have to be the researchers. Besides, university researchers are not in a vacuum. They will get patents for their innovations, paid for by the uni, even if it’s not ever commercialized. And universities are notoriously bad at just shelving innovations instead of commercializing them. Most schools just simply do not have the right people in-house to do it successfully. There even exists offices of commercialization in the larger universities whose sole purpose is to find for-profit buyers / licensors for their under-funded research. And even they still fail at finding buyers for many practical innovations. The more people that know about their innovations the more likely it is to get the right funding and market access behind it and become commercialized. These are the facts in the real world.