Many possible answers. One might be that even if the KNOW it can't be commercialized someone like Polariton may still like the attention they get from the results they publish (ie a world record is a real attention grabber) for various reasons, or they may still believe they can learn something important through the collaboration.
And if they don't know it can't be commercialized -- but also don't know that it can be commercialized yet (who really does?), they may be working with it with the hopes that it will be worthy of commercialization sometime down the road.
This assumes that the 2 photonics companies are even interested in commercialization themselves. They may be geek guys who really just dig the science behind it all more than anything else.
Market Data 
Markets 
AI
