Percentage of GDP spent on research has declined. The US was 200M people in 1970. We're 320M now. Per capita research spending in constant dollars has declined as well.
This is a bad thing.
I think that in an increasingly specialized workforce, the management team has less bandwidth to apply to R&D. One stump hit and it's done for. Successfully leading R&D has little payback in the larger economy; leading M&A is better understood. This is a corollary of the general "tower of Babel" problem.
Remember that Amazon is slightly a tribe of madmen to most business types in large companies.
According to the "best and brightest", R&D is now nothing more than patent pursuit. If the systems used for production are old and buggy, fixing that ( including significant new development ) is not considered "R&D", no matter how proprietary said systems may be.