The relationship between industry and academia is borderline parasitic.
Academia trains the talent, and nowadays industry tries to make them stay there as long as possible (wait until they finish their PhD), developing their skills and potentially interesting projects while on the taxpayer's dime.
Industry is always busy on safe incremental improvements, while the stuff with the potential to be truly revolutionary only happens in academia -- the article cites many great examples. And as soon as a project starts to show promise, they take over. Public research, private profits.
Finally, even for their shy incremental improvements, they rely to an extent on academic research for inspiration.<p>Whether or not this dynamic is good or fair for society, to me it's obvious that academia is necessary for industry to thrive (unless we do a complete restructuring of the whole system or something). Shutting it down seems incompatible with having cutting edge technology.<p>P.S.: Don't get the impression I'm a sucker for academia either. It's rotten as well.