Large corporations like Amazon offset tax liability with tax credits from huge R&D expenditures [1], and those can be "moonshots" or highly innovative products that change the world. The famous CEOs quoted in this article take full advantage of this and there is definitely room to get creative with how that money is spent.

A friend of mine working at <large tech megacorp> told me that it is not uncommon for them to assign product/eng teams to build novel, competing solutions to the same problem or product space, sometimes without even knowing about the existence of the other team(s).

Similarly, I've heard <other large tech megacorp> sends the green college new grads out to hack together products and innovate with new ideas as quickly as possible, and once they find product market fit, they hand over the project to the seasoned senior engineers to build it out at global scale.

These anecdotes might just be hearsay BS, but it does make me think: how creative can you get with R&D and who makes those decisions? In what ways do the CEO/CFOs play a constructive role in this process?

[1] https://www.vox.com/2018/4/9/17204004/amazon-research-develo...