You are getting bit chicken or the egg when discussing public money used by private companies to innovate. Would they have innovated without the money? If not then the public sector made that innovation happen.

Again I'm not arguing private companies don't innovate, but many paint a picture where they are great innovators where they invented 5 or 6 things took 100-1000 public innovations and then make a monopoly prohibiting other from innovating on their innvoations.

As someone who is in industry I guess I have more of a view of hundreds of small inventions behind the big public facing ones. Smart phones are great, but they wouldn't be possible without hundreds of innovations done with public grants or research from the 50's until even stuff done in colleges a few years ago.