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by jamesdwilson 3383 days ago
but companies such as cocacola, and well, many many others, are researching things all the time for discoveries that benefit their company.
1 comments

That's great for solving known problems, like maybe Coke could estimate that reducing turbulence in their pipes in Warehouse ABC would save them a half million dollars a year. Then they can set aside money, maybe insure the project against failure, the insurance company has some idea what to charge them for such a policy, and so on.

But when Einstein was working on Relativity nobody could have foreseen what it would make possible. In that case the discovery was made and then eventually the business sector found a way to sell it, decades afterwards. Today we know what GPS makes possible so we know what it's worth, but in 1905 there was basically no market value for it.

good points, thank you