[leoedin]

I think this is a bad take - large corporations like Airbus are terrible at R&D. They're simply not optimised for it. It's not very hard to move much, much quicker than a large corporation does - because the people inside the large corporation are having to contend with internal politics, legacy tools, legacy cost structures, and corporate inertia that doesn't like doing things a new way.

If you've worked in both a startup and a large corporation doing R&D, it's really obvious that startups are far, far more effective at it. If you gave $10m to a startup, vs a budget in a corporate project, you'd probably get 10x the result from the startup.

Where corporations excel is in scaling things up. Once you have a good design, you need a good manufacturing process and a solid supply chain. Startups rarely have the capital or knowledge to put that in place, while big engineering corporations will.