Competition leads to innovation when the definition of success and its metrics are set correctly. A big chunk of "success" in academia is the number of publications, and funding often depends on that exact metric. As a result, competition in academia is very good for innovation in the field of producing papers and winning grants. I'm not saying the respective scientific research is wrong or doesn't exist, I'm just saying the system is skewed towards this one metric in an unhealthy way.

It's similar to competition in tech products not leading to innovation. The important metric there is financial growth and stock value, and there are ways to increase those metrics without really focusing on true innovation in the core domain.