They only go out in devices after they've been patented.
Think of 3 years of research. Rather than it leading to three years of progressively better consumer devices, you instead patent the first idea and use it to go to market, then sit on the rest. After X amount of time (where X < 20 years), you patent the next winning idea, and go to market with it. Etc.
This presents a challenge to would be competitors; to go to market, you have to leapfrog the existing technology and patent (with as broad a language as patents tend to have), hope the incumbent doesn't have something that would immediately deprecate your product (or at least, relies itself on something you patented along the way), and then overcome the incumbent's existing advantage in in the market. And also be prepared for a legal fight, since almost assuredly one of you is going to accuse the other of infringing a patent.
Think of 3 years of research. Rather than it leading to three years of progressively better consumer devices, you instead patent the first idea and use it to go to market, then sit on the rest. After X amount of time (where X < 20 years), you patent the next winning idea, and go to market with it. Etc.
This presents a challenge to would be competitors; to go to market, you have to leapfrog the existing technology and patent (with as broad a language as patents tend to have), hope the incumbent doesn't have something that would immediately deprecate your product (or at least, relies itself on something you patented along the way), and then overcome the incumbent's existing advantage in in the market. And also be prepared for a legal fight, since almost assuredly one of you is going to accuse the other of infringing a patent.