But consider the long term, all the people who studied and worked hard and invented something and ended up with nothing to show for it because they could not protect their intellectual property, who were simply crowded out by a bigger, more efficient company with lower costs and bigger profit margins. If that was often the ultimate fate of a career in science, engineering, technology etc. it is quite possible that a lot less people will choose those careers in the first place.

Most people never own their own intellectual property anyway. They give it away to corporations that use their leverage to accumulate the intellectual property their employees produce.

If patents didn't exist it might even foster collaboration, because you can't protect your ideas so you share them to help them become reality. Big businesses wouldn't be able to create monopolies and back room deals to keep out smaller players. They would be forced to compete with each other or die.

If we did away with intellectual property the changes would be monumental for society.

All software would be free. All movies, music, media, would be free to use and expand on and play with (coupled with all the highest-end software), and yes, even profit from. Artistic expression would explode. We'd all have the tools of productions at our fingertips.

Medication and drug prices would plummet.

Companies could no longer fund their own research unless they really had an abundance of human capital to stay ahead of trends. There would be no more situations where you finished working, and then just continued to profit from the work while you sat idly by doing nothing. You'd have a rise of non-profit corporate models - or crowd-sourcing - for drug discovery, movie making, game making. Taxes would fund the most important fields where there was still high demand.

I think in the future there will be no such thing as a for-profit corporation.