[mcculley]

I don't understand your reply. I'm familiar with private industry projects producing high-risk projects requiring lots of long term up front investment in capital and time and private industry projects working low-risk efforts where using the customers as testers is perfectly fine. Likewise there are small units of government entities that can iterate on low-risk projects in addition to the big infrastructure projects that larger government organizations work on.

I think the OP is painting with too broad a brush when talking about "private industry".