I agree with your premise, and can decorate it with some details, but also can't claim inside knowledge to the BigCo research environments you describe. One da

I agree with your premise, and can decorate it with some details, but also can't claim inside knowledge to the BigCo research environments you describe. One datapoint might be the recent movements of the SURGE Accelerator down in Houston. They focus exclusively on energy startups, but after four years of being an accelerator for such companies, they've put the accelerator on hold and raised a venture fund to focus on the current portfolio companies that are having success. Part of that is obviously the market impact of $40 oil, but another factor seems to be that their companies are selling to medium or large energy companies as customers, and this simply makes their path to growth a more drawn-out affair. As you point out in your "building a bridge" sentence, the budgets in energy may be huge, but that's a result of sheer complexity and (human) scale rather than a willingness to spend on every-other shiny new thing.