Especially in the tech field, we talk about R and D. Especially in application development, generally speaking, you're much closer to the D than you are the R. That being said, there is still research that happens within companies.
In terms of investment and return on that investment and research, if you can find the right talent, that is largely the cheapest way to do that research. Then there's no question about resulting ownership and ability to exploit it.
While we love working with universities, we also do a lot of applied research, in software especially. Largely, that takes the form of prototyping, experimentation, and testing new technologies and things like that, more so than fundamental research that is going to yield some sort of breakthrough like you'd find in the medical field, battery technology, or something like that.