Spot on.

Liberal democracies understand most of this, too, they just don't like to admit it or the implications. The state will fund experimental research through e.g. universities. Then the successful stuff gets sold off to the highest bidder. The problem with doing it this way, though, is that it doesn't tackle the key contradiction.

The public funding bodies come back full circle to what you describe and the state decision makers face the same problem: how to know which ideas will be profitable? Researchers have to indicate this in research bids and do 'knowledge exchange' work. It's all guess work, still. Researchers and universities know it and write about the problem.The funders know it and write about the problem.

But very few can admit that there is no solution within the logic of capitalism. Meanwhile, this model provides a very good way of 'transparently' and 'rigourously' giving almost all the research money to a handful of top universities who return the favour by asking pharmaceutical and military corporations what tech they would like to see develop (because it's too expensive for the corps to develop with their own money). (I won't even go into how much benign research is repackaged for the MIC, to the chagrin of the researchers.)

If you're interested in the publication of such research, I can give you a citation for a peer-reviewed historical materialist analysis of academic publishing.