A fine example of this is Jansky's discovery of stellar radio emissions in the early 1930s. He found them while he was working for Bell Labs. Neither Bell Labs (of all places) nor astronomers were interested in further investigation.
That discovery would lead to radio astronomy ... no thanks to established interests.
But Bell Labs is remembered for things like the transistor, which had huge impact.
There's a basic assumption you're making here and which underlies a lot of the writing on this topic - that it's desirable, even morally virtuous, for research funding to be disconnected from application.
Bell Labs funded the transistor and not radio astronomy because apart from making cool TV documentaries, radio astronomy isn't actually useful for much. If we knew how to travel faster than light and explore the universe it'd be extremely useful, but we don't, so learning things about what a remote corner of the galaxy looked like a few billion years ago is easily argued to be a rather absurd waste of limited research dollars.
It's exactly what this op-ed in the Scientific American is talking about: a research field optimised to produce papers independent of any concrete economic utility function. In a world where such things get funded, what exactly should scientists be measured by? They can't be measured by market success because nobody cares or has any use for their output: their work is pure academic navel/star-gazing. So they pretty much have to be measured by volume of output or respect of their peers, both of which are closed and circular systems of measurement.
In my view the right fix for the science crisis is not to pay scientists to research whatever the hell they like with no success measurement at all: that really is directly equivalent to just firing them all and putting them on social security (or "UBI" as HNers like to call it). The right thing to do would probably be to just slash academic funding dramatically and reduce corporation taxes so corporate research can be given more funding. The net result would still be a drop in the amount of science done, but as Bayer's study makes clear, "not enough science" is not the world's problem right now.
Thanks for the reply. Yes indeed, Bell was famous for its many discoveries and applications. It was also famous (among science and engineering pros of its time) for granting its employees lots of time to spend on their own projects. Why they dropped-the-ball on Jansky's find is probably complicated.
The person that did lead the way to the (now enormous) field of radio astronomy was Grote Reber. He had a BSEE degree. It was his life-long passion, in his free time, at his own expense, and he had to struggle to get anyone to pay attention. He personally discovered Cygnus A in 1939 (and lots more). But he didn't get the physics Nobel in 1974. Instructive story:.
That discovery would lead to radio astronomy ... no thanks to established interests.