I worked at SAIC back when it was a small company (and before changing the name to Leidos). I will forever be grateful for being able to work about 25% of my ti

I worked at SAIC back when it was a small company (and before changing the name to Leidos). I will forever be grateful for being able to work about 25% of my time on IR&D, all of my own choosing. I think the US government allowed us about 1% or 2% of our gross to be reimbursed R&D - I forget the details. At my last job before retiring (Capital One, a great company to work for BTW) my team had a huge amount of autonomy on what we worked on, but my team was awesome. I don’t really understand the relative merits of many small R&D projects vs. huge infrastructure. Perhaps the industry is just moving to a many small projects approach?