Inventions could be publicly funded and then the findings be made available to everyone. We already pay for all the inventions we use indirectly so why not just fund them to begin with and actually have access to this information.
Of course, tacit know-how and first-to-market advantages will always exist to some extent. So, in a sense, we can't fully get rid of "IP"-like dynamics. But we can, and should, mitigate them.