Sometimes, sure, but I've seen so many great ideas that the PIs then try to take to market and it fails because they don't know anything about building a business. Licensing of course works too but again, for everything that gets farmed out to a manufacturer under a license, there's 100 basic research projects that never escape the lab. The list of patents available for commercialization just from NASA is enormous, and few of those are consumer available, for the same reasons.