We have to separate out these two things: research activity is vastly different from innovation activity. You do research because it generates knowledge, it generates people, it generates excitement and places that are attractive. There is not an innovative place in the world that doesn't have a university. Universities play don't play an innovation role, but a research role.
But we can do a whole bunch of things. One idea would be to open our labs to firms. Have a firm come in and use our equipment. The quid pro quo would be sharing data so we could do Ph.D. theses. Get them to work together. Make the boundary between the university lab and the industry lab more permeable. Have grad students and post-docs move back and forth. That's where real knowledge transfer happens. It's not actually the patents; it's the thing in their brains.