[malchow]

"By which metric would you measure this "efficiency"?"

Good question. A few ideas:

-- ROIC -- Competitive advantage versus peers (hard to measure, but one attempt: http://web.mit.edu/is08/pdf/Parrish.pdf) -- Share of market -- Enlargement of market -- Quality of hiring versus peers

These are the things that can make a company last for centuries. The hunch I was stating -- though admittedly without a clear way to prove it yea or nay -- is that enterprises that invest in small nimble VC-backed technology companies will begin to outperform, on these measures, traditional in-house R&D departments.