Explain your R&D work to a fifteen-year-old

The mystery of the incumbent organization: it often owner by capitalist feudal lords, it wishes to achieve a monopoly or oligopoly that lasts as long as possible thanks to regulation harming competitors and corruption of public officials while at the same time benefitting from cost cuts resulting from a free market on the suppliers’ side. It hires employees (ie people who cannot or will not pursue entrepreneurship for whatever reason) while proclaiming bottom-up democratic approaches to innovation and egging everyone on to be entrepreneurial, despite operating with a periodic authoritarian top-down resource allocation (budgeting), while boasting humanist diversity and inclusion buttressed by a solid budget on the HR and Legal sides.

If you think about it, it’s a surprise that it achieves anything, and even an utter miracle that this notion of a business full of inherent contradiction has led to such prosperity (yes, with a lot of externalities, too…).