If so, companies would have no incentive to innovate, in investing in research and development, and the society would simply not evolve.
That is not true, innovation can be crowd funded, like with ICO's in cryptocurrencies, and DAO's.
Therefore patents are not needed.
Yeah sure, that makes sense on a society point of view, but not on a firm's POV.
Achieving a competitive advantage means doing something different from competition, if every company has the same knowledge they will be closed to perfect competition, which firm want that?
Well it's not like they have to livestream their production process, and surveillance is already immoral.
So unless they spy on them or some whistleblower reveals key details about the secrets of the company, I am sure they can have many many advantages over others.