There exists an axis which all institutions lie upon where (i) those that do direct business and support short-term incremental innovations exist on the left hand side, and (ii) abstract research institutes supporting long-term paradigm shifts of innovation exist on the right had side.
Both serve the same ultimate purpose.
sorry for grammar i'm tired.
For example: We are building a social platform that will change the way the upper class communicates with a chat-site exclusively for the rich as We are building technology that gets removes the need for cars and allows people to get around faster and safer.
I tend to lean toward the cynical interpretation.
That kind of science takes large scale organization and specialization by each person in a narrow field. It carries enormous organizational costs. It's also frequently quite a lot of boring work.
Easier to just speculate on a wide area of interesting topics while you wait for people to do the real work.
Looks like I leaned so far towards the cynical interpretation that I fell over on it.
All I can say is - it's starting to look like it did work (the "spend years convincing people to fund it" path) and it's not at all obvious even in retrospect what else we could've done.