A few years ago, my manager at the time explained to me how our company had acted as an incubator for 2-3 of our competitors. It worked like this: Our company w

A few years ago, my manager at the time explained to me how our company had acted as an incubator for 2-3 of our competitors. It worked like this: Our company would design a product over the course of a few years and once it was in the pipeline (being bought) it would have a life of a few years. More than once, the then current CEO of the company would decide to cut the engineering staff to save money and move on before the next product to fill the pipeline would be needed i.e. the lack of new products wouldn't show up on the bottom line for a few years. In the meantime, the talented engineering team (that they layed off) would go out and start another company to compete with us....