Have you ever worked in a research capacity at either an academic or for-profit institution? My experience has been that private for-profit entities are good at scale and terrible at discovering new ideas.
Small sample size? I believe there are a few private for-profit companies which have discovered a new idea or two.
In biomedicine, at least, I'd really need some examples. Every break-through I can think of came from publicly funded research, which then gets turned into a product.
I'd bet that the vast majority of industry innovations can be linked to corresponding work in academia. That's not to say that industry doesn't innovate, but they clearly feed off each other in a mutually beneficial way.