What is the basic difference between a researcher in a corporation, and a university?
As a researcher in a company, I need to take issue with the current answers as reflecting a very narrow view of corporate research. This view is common in academia and reflects the typically limited experience of university researchers with the diversity of the non-academic research ecosystem.
A large amount of research in corporations is, indeed, focused on the near-term needs of products. Companies whose business model is based on widget sales will tend to put their money into better widgets, after all. There are a lot of business models, however, that are not about widget sales.  Some examples:

Some corporations have government funded R&amp;D as a long-term component of their business model. There are important aspects of the research space (even basic research!) that universities are often ill-suited to execute, including:

Research with high team complexity or high integration complexity (professors are not typically professional program managers)
Research that requires a high degree of quality control (grad students are often unreliable!)
Research involving classified or otherwise controlled information
Research at intermediate levels of maturity (where papers are scarce, but the relationship to widget sales is still hazy)


Some corporations have long-term strategic interests that they support by means of R&amp;D investments, including university-like basic R&amp;D. This was the old Bell Labs model (which is still going strong!) and it's still in play in many large corporations, such as IBM, Microsoft Research, etc.
Some corporations, especially non-profits, have missions that explicitly include research goals.
Some corporations are education-focused (just with different educational models), and carry out research as part of advancing their educational mission.
The boundaries between universities and companies can often become blurry, particularly around university &quot;advanced ventures&quot; organizations and in the medical space, where there's a near-fractal complexity in the academic/corporate relationships in many university medical complexes.

The life that you will lead as a researcher in these different sorts of organizations is very heterogeneous. Even within a single organization, such as the one that I work at, the goals and incentives are very different for researchers on the primary investigator track, the program manager track, and the implementer track. Even tenure can be less different than you might think, given the existence of fellows programs and the like.
So what is the basic difference?

All universities are primarily focused on student education, and all professor positions fall into one of a small number of career models.
Every other research organization is much less constrained in form, and you cannot make any assumptions until you understand their business model.