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> What good is a R&D performed that can't be commercialized?

Then I guess we can throw out Xerox Parc's NLS because they never commercialized "windows, hypertext, graphics, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor." They were commercialized by others later on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos

We can also throw out most psych, social science, archeology, and history R&D, too.



Also 2000 years of Mathematicians talking about Prime Numbers before someone came up with the idea of cryptography using prime numbers.

And the laser, which took a few decades to find an application.


NLS came from SRI not Xerox PARC. NLS was in fact commercialized and sold by Tymshare.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NLS_(computer_system)

Fun fact: funded by ARPA


Would love to know what the last major breakthrough in social science / psych R&D was.

Archeology / history, on the other hand, definitely have some pretty awesome finds.


Maybe UBI? I mean, hard to say it's been tested enough, but that feels like an answer to this question.


> We can also throw out most psych, social science

Yes.


First at all, they had to be called 'sciences'. They aren't.




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