There's certainly something to be said about it being possible -- more so now than ever -- for hackers to work alone, without affiliation with a large R&D organization or academia. Rich Hickey's work has been amazing and will be influential (the persistent immutable data structures are beginning to spread beyond Clojure). It's also interesting that Hickey was able to "bootstrap" himself from consulting rather than full-time work, regaining full rights to his work (not being subject to the all-too-common agreements which require one to give the fruit of all of their ideas to their employer).
Academia is still doing well (Scala from EPFL, some fairly interesting distributed systems work going on at Berkeley) and there are also university-based spin-offs e.g., Stonebraker start-ups (even though I disagree with some of his approaches, it's still great to see companies built to solve difficult and interesting problems). Historically these have been big on the West Coast: Google, Inktomi, Ousterhout's start-ups (Scriptics, Electric Cloud). I haven't seen any emerge recently, but perhaps I haven't been looking in the right places (or have been too cynical about what I saw).
