It seems that the commercialization impact of R&D spending is more complicated than I had thought (https://www.natureindex.com/news-blog/measuring-the-impact-o...), but I would still encourage you to look at how much various places spend on R&D, and how many people they manage to move through STEM university programs (in terms of percentage of their own native-born population).
We also may need to spend more effort explicitly targeting our R&D industry towards finding mysteries and solving them. Basic scientific advancement, after all, comes precisely from exploring the unknown rather than from merely innovating within the bounds of the already-known.
And then there's patent reform and such to think about. Blah blah.
But you should take everything I say with a grain of salt, since I work for an R&D company.
I think that making people constantly scramble to meet the next deadline puts a harmful damper on innovation and Big New Ideas. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-...
We also may need to spend more effort explicitly targeting our R&D industry towards finding mysteries and solving them. Basic scientific advancement, after all, comes precisely from exploring the unknown rather than from merely innovating within the bounds of the already-known.
And then there's patent reform and such to think about. Blah blah.
But you should take everything I say with a grain of salt, since I work for an R&D company.