they make available the capital for innovation, their investment in the most lucrative markets is propelling research to heights that state planned investment can only envy from the sidelines, and the availability of concentrated capital allows for production methods that are unavailable to distributed means of produciton, so much that the production output for bleeding edge technology is absolutely overwhelming even when distributed or stated owner proprietorship had a head start in research, see for example radar "stealth" technology originating in russia in the 60s.
That is the whole game.