system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Is scientific/public progress doomed to fall behind corporate/private progress? Isn't there "hidden" research by companies that doubles with public research? What is the role of public scientific progress: common ground/ knowdlege sharing?

Hello, I hope the questions in the title aren't too confusing. A year from now I'd like to start my PhD in the direction of IT-Compliance / Information Management / Workflows / Information Systems. Contemplating about my topic, a larger question emerged.

I think of scientific progress as public, since scientist publish their work, which is then available for other researchers (although not necessarily free of charge). 
However many companies have their own research labs and don't share their progress (at least not willingly, hello corporate espionage).
 
So it seems to me that there should be fields were companies are progressing scientifically while in parallel there is public scientific progress. Also, there are probably fields were companies are leading the scientific progress compared to the freely available information. Imagine a pharmaceutical company researching on its own for 30 years - sure their products can be reverse engineered, but all the failed products, groundwork etc. isn't published. 

So the "cutting-edge" research I can build upon while preparing my PhD might not even be the real cutting-edge, since somewhere a company might already have researched that. This certainly depends on the field though, quantum physics and pharmacology are examples.

So what is the role then of public science? If I want to advance my field of interest by researching, publishing, PhDing, shouldn't I check with a few companies first that I suspect to be the real technological leaders? Or am I doing this research for the *public domain*, elevating the common ground of scientific knowledge so society as a whole can advance? (Sure part of the research is for boring reasons like "I want my damn PhD idk")

Or is it even not a problem? How long does it take for *company knowledge* to spread to the public domain? Certainly the public scientific research is often quite theoretical and company research is more often about practical solutions, but the example of pharmaceutical companies ilustrates the problem quite well.

Am I missing something, or is this conflict / parallel research just the way it is? 
How are you dealing with this in your field?
gpt
Companies have very little appetite for the kind of research that goes on in academia. It's risky, too far away from application, and all the good researchers insist on publishing anyway. What private companies do end up developing and not sharing are more derivative discoveries from what's been published, such as a novel large scale protein purification and refolding train for a hard-to-purify target that has been biologically validated in literature already. These things are called trade secrets.

The paradigm is blue skies academic research is risky, and dependent on public funding. Conversely, industry research is very applied and nearly always targets the low hanging, ripe, fruit, with a direct path to monetization.

So the "main branch" of science will continue forward since it's mainly dependent on grant funded research.