You should realize that saving billions of dollars on R&D is not really a good thing. It may get you up to a point, but you stagnate afterwards, because you di

You should realize that saving billions of dollars on R&D is not really a good thing. It may get you up to a point, but you stagnate afterwards, because you didn't cover your fundamentals and build the skills necessary to advance forward. At a national level, the R&D spending is actually important to build up your society's fundamental expertise in an area. You learn from your failures and mistakes. And in the meanwhile, you build up the expertise in your population, and those people, may later leave, and form other companies, which further advances your society. However, if you can get the research results of your competitors, and learn that certain paths don't work, then you can save time and money, and not go down that same path. But, I still feel that you learn most from your failures, because you build in safeguards to prevent them from happening again in the future. So you end up with a technique, a system of systems, to build out your final product. It's like Edison said, "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."