I think the issue is that companies like Philips aren't just buying a rising star, they are also buying out fractions of early startups or creating 'accelerators' for early startups. They are reaching out and grabbing earlier and earlier in the pipeline.
To me this is bad from two angles. For startups, they start to get influenced and stiffled by big corp 'this is the right way' too soon, which stiffles innovation. For big companies it gives suits an easy cost down to defund internal R&D and externalize that cost, this means that all the deep pocket research you had in the golden days of Bell Labs cannot be replicated, which again stiffles innovation.
To me this is bad from two angles. For startups, they start to get influenced and stiffled by big corp 'this is the right way' too soon, which stiffles innovation. For big companies it gives suits an easy cost down to defund internal R&D and externalize that cost, this means that all the deep pocket research you had in the golden days of Bell Labs cannot be replicated, which again stiffles innovation.