There are two research incentives. The incentive of potential profit, and the incentive of wanting an end product.
People would have wanted, and invested in, the development of 3D printers for just the personal desire part. This is how the most valuable R&D works right now - the vast majority of cancer and major life debilitating disease research is being done not by big pharma (who are instead just researching more dick enlargement pills and modified recipes of the same drugs on the market today they can re-patent for 20 years and bribe off doctors to prescribe exclusively by name because they are the most reliable payoffs for their investments) but by university and state level research institution and non-profits dedicated to their research.
The unsettling truth is that truly revolutionary research does not often come out of profit driven R&D labs. Those organizations are arranged to minimize the risk of research, which also dramatically cuts its potential yields by only targeting predictable results that can quickly be turned into government-granted monopoly profits. Its exploitation of a flawed system that takes talent that could be going towards truly innovative R&D that would almost certainly offset at least what would be lost in cutting these (predominantly) leeches out of the industry.
Believe it or not, the ideal you are talking about doesn't really exist anymore unfortunately. Even university research nowadays is primarily funded by external sources (government and industry). The more affluent universities have internal funding setup which is typically quite competitive and needs some sort of deliverable anyways. Case in point: the most desirable skill in a university professor is figuring out how to convince others to fund your work, while also giving them something in return. The exception of course is government. NSF and similar government programs are the only funding sources for pure basic research as far as I know.
People would have wanted, and invested in, the development of 3D printers for just the personal desire part. This is how the most valuable R&D works right now - the vast majority of cancer and major life debilitating disease research is being done not by big pharma (who are instead just researching more dick enlargement pills and modified recipes of the same drugs on the market today they can re-patent for 20 years and bribe off doctors to prescribe exclusively by name because they are the most reliable payoffs for their investments) but by university and state level research institution and non-profits dedicated to their research.
The unsettling truth is that truly revolutionary research does not often come out of profit driven R&D labs. Those organizations are arranged to minimize the risk of research, which also dramatically cuts its potential yields by only targeting predictable results that can quickly be turned into government-granted monopoly profits. Its exploitation of a flawed system that takes talent that could be going towards truly innovative R&D that would almost certainly offset at least what would be lost in cutting these (predominantly) leeches out of the industry.