The only perspective in society from which it appears that Academia does more R&D than the private sector is academia itself. Academics in this respect have their eyes wide shut.

At mot, publishing in academic conferences at private companies is namesake. But academic publishing in general is a shadow of its former self in terms of dissemination power, both because most academics are horrible writers and also because a product you can buy (with a support contract) or a well-documented software package is many orders of magnitude more impactful than a paper no one will read.

And even then, many companies publish far more than even highly productive research universities.

Consider AI. There are little pieces here and there that you can attribute to academia. But for the most part, over the last two decades, the enabling big steps happened at TSMC+NVIDIA+Google+OpenAI.