Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of economic incentive for technology. Its economic incentive for producing the foundational knowledge necessary for technological advance that can be an issue.

While relatively basic technological advances don't require that much foundational knowledge, more advanced ones do. To use an example from my own career: I have good reason to believe that the gooey layer of proteins coating the inside of your blood vessels (the glycocalyx) plays a critical role in promoting efficient oxygen delivery protecting against vascular disease. If I can come up with a method of modulating glycocalyx properties in a site specific manner, I'll make a killing in the private sector and save countless lives. The problems this advance would solve have been around for millennia and in the public spotlight for decades. The trouble is, we didn't know that the glycocalyx might be involved until decades of publicly funded research began indicating a problem in this system. Moreover, we didn't even confirm that his layer of proteins even existed until about 15-20 years ago. We still don't entirely understand the mechanisms regulating the glycocalyx or its components.

There's a colossal economic incentive to address the unmet clinical needs associated with glycocalyx function, but until about the past five years, we had no prior knowledge indicating that the glycocalyx would be a viable target.

This plays out time and time again in technology. If what you need to achieve in order to solve a problem isn't obvious, a lot of work goes into solving those earlier basic research questions first. Before we had government funding agencies, these advancements took hundreds or thousands of years. Now they take decades.

A key ongoing problem is that government funding isn't reliable and often comes with strings attached. We need a viable alternative, but I've yet to see good reason to believe that corporations or non profits can adequately fill this niche.