They don't necessarily have to, and even if they did, it may not be obvious.
Consider a financial company working to improve prediction algorithms for their in-house use, hiring smartypants PhDs and giving them free reign and great pay. The result after ten years could be way ahead (or even just a little ahead) of the academic world's work and never release a product with a sticker for a big shiny new algorithm.
The firm wouldn't even have to stand out in its success; it could do reasonably well compared to others, and just attribute a lot of its modest success to its algorithmic insights.
Even in externally released products, really clever ways to get around things aren't necessarily visible. Just today I was reading about Jonathan Blow's work [1] on localised kriging [2] for his upcoming game The Witness. He's pulling from advanced geostatics academia for a little feature he wanted in a game, and if he didn't blog about it (and then discuss enhancements in the comments) no one would know it existed - even once the game is released. A small example to be sure, but I think it exemplifies the point.
[1] http://the-witness.net/news/2010/05/kriging-is-cool/
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriging
