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From a recent Fortune article, a clear example of why corporations do basic research:
For [Bill Gates] this is a triumphant visit to China, a victory lap of sorts, on which I’ve been invited to tag along. The country is his. No other Fortune 500 CEO gets quite the same treatment in China. … It was not always so. Microsoft bumbled for years after entering China in 1992, and its business was a disaster there for a decade. … But it was a relatively small step in 1998 – the opening of a research center in Beijing – that proved a turning point. "We just started it here because we thought they’d do great research," says Gates, who raves about the quality of the country’s computer scientists. The lab was what Gates calls a "windfall" for Microsoft’s image. It began accumulating an impressive record of academic publications, helped lure back smart migr scientists, and contributed key components to globally released products like the Vista operating system. The lab soon became, according to polls, the most desirable place in the country for computer scientists to work.
Basic research would go on even with no government or charity funding. Its main function is not research progress, however, but signaling impressive abilities.
Basic Research As Signal
Robin, You claimed that the quote was 'evidence' for your claim, but the quote says nothing about the chinese being induced to buy gates' product, which you seem to claim the quote says, but it does not say.
Moreover, the quote has no infomation at all about signaling impressive abilities, or the relation between basic research and signaling impressive abilities, all it does have, relevant to your claim, is evidence directly contrary to your claim, namely gates' statement that the institute was created to do great research.
So the quote you are claiming as evidence for your claim provides no evidence for it, only evidence against it.
In what way can evidence against your claim be interpreted as evidence for your claim? Do you see what I am saying?
It's also not "how much" they spend on research but "how" via leveraging in four areas: ideation, project selection, product development, and commercialization.
Robin: Basic research would go on even with no government or charity funding. Its main function is not research progress, however, but signaling impressive abilities.
About signaling abilities. Here is some data, that might be useful to analyze. If you look at some average measures, the number of science citations in in Italy and France are rather similar, yet, proportionally, the France government inputs about two times Italy's government of GDP into basic research. Italy has almost no basic research in the private sector, either. Some explanation? The only two explanations I've found is that First: Italy is unusual in the amount of support that the families give to their children. Most Italian scientists I know are living in property that were either given to them, or acquired with substantial familial financial support, so in essence, the Italian families are subsidizing Italian science. Second: After decades of steady decrease in government funding, those who remain in the country are unusually passionate about their subject.