Lo and behold the Director shortly leaves the company to found a startup aimed at solving Problem X. Eighteen months later we buy them, aquihiring back the director and some engineers who left with him to start the startup.
The head of the business unit knew he couldn't get the approval from the board to solve Problem X, so he basically outsourced the risk and in the end the director and his engineers ended up with a nice chunk of change and their old jobs back.
In tech it's also pretty sad that small startups with a good product still don't feel that they can make it on their own but instead prefer to be bought up by a bigger player who then shuts down their product.
May be those people really hate working on the startup and all they want is a big fat exit. That is reasonable.
To put a little wrinkle in it, it's both big companies outsourcing R&D to pick from the winners, but also tax payers subsidizing the R&D through R&D tax credits.