Academia is almost entirely steered by government policy, at least in the Anglosphere. There is a bureaucratic not-very-scientific evaluation process for research proposals. And things like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Excellence_Framework , which has been criticized for practically requiring people to game the "impact" metric in order to keep their jobs.
I think I was more referring to academia than commercial research even if there is a large intersection.
Academia is almost entirely steered by government policy, at least in the Anglosphere. There is a bureaucratic not-very-scientific evaluation process for research proposals. And things like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Excellence_Framework , which has been criticized for practically requiring people to game the "impact" metric in order to keep their jobs.