I don't see how that is a refutation of what I wrote. For every example that people can point to of how government funding creates innovation you can point to a private example too. Heavier than air flight was mostly private money, jet engines were mostly government. The transistor was mostly private (Bell Labs) the IC was mostly government. In terms of energy the two most important things in the last few decades are solar and fracking. Solar got a lot of government subsidies, fracking improvements were largely due to industry.

Edit: and there are entire industries, like petrochemicals, where most of the advances came from industry.

Even things like semiconductors benefitted massively from government research and funding. They’ve certainly taken off from there, though.

I’m trying to think of what industries this might not be the case for. Research thin industries like entertainment and media? Has the development of things like OLED mostly been by private companies? I guess finance? Seemingly if it involves engineering the government at least made the seed investment.