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I think a lot of people don't understand that R&D is like flushing money down the drain until one day you happen to invent interplanetary teleportation. It's h
by thrashh 3y ago
I think a lot of people don't understand that R&D is like flushing money down the drain until one day you happen to invent interplanetary teleportation.
It's hard to really grasp, kind of like insurance which I swear a lot of people also don't really get but in reverse (where you throw a lot of money seemingly down the drain until possibly the day where it completely makes up for it).
How do you tackle budgeting for something with zero guarantees? Not very easily.
- mywittyname 3y ago> I think a lot of people don't understand that R&D is like flushing money down the drain until one day you happen to invent interplanetary teleportation. I wouldn't say that at all. There are lots of small, tangible positive outcomes that occur along the way. Inventing interplanetary travel is great. But even a failed project gives smart people experience, generates research that might have application elsewhere, funds general economic development. Lots of indirect development comes from R&D. Think a chemical engineering PhD student designs some software to solve a problem specific to their research, then finds out that there's a broader market for that kind of software and leaves his research to pursue that as a business. I think that a lot of people think R&D is only about achieving a specific goal. When, in reality, it's about researching and developing a lot of smaller things in the general direction of a particular goal.
- thrashh 3y agoI definitely was over-simplifying but R&D can feel that way sometimes.