> 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 wo

> 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.