This view misunderstands the nature of modern science and R&D. Interesting R&D is shockingly expensive, and you need mega-corps to do it. The cost of a new fab is $10 billion now, and it's been increasing exponentially. The 747 cost $7.5 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars to develop. The 787 cost almost $30 billion. The future of science and technology is not Edison inventing the lightbulb in his private lab. It's mega-corps doing mega-R&D.
This used to be less true in CS, but that's changing due to machine learning. Google has a huge leg-up in self-driving-car R&D because of the enormous amount of data it has from Google services. In "hard" R&D, even "startups" are spending the kind of capital that previously used to only be in the province of established conglomerates.
