Tip: All highly industrialised, wealthy nations are the same. Central govt provides huge sums for academic research with the hope that it can be commercialised.
In many fields of study, the money that goes into academic research is essentially more of high-level-talent education expense, so that local companies have pools of PhDs to hire from, rather than needing to produce a invention that will be commercialized.
E.g. if you look at PhD graduates only one in a few hundred (even in STEM fields) will end up on a path that commercializes their research, with most of the other ones moving into industry and likely not working on a directly related subject to their thesis. That's not necessarily a bad thing.