thats called R&D. I don't personally spend millions of dollars, but I do spend money on things that never pan out but teach me a lot of lessons I can apply to my next project

It's not as strict as you are trying to make it out to be. My favorite job ever was a small company. The owner was fine with us programmers just working on pet projects on company time. I was goofing around at some point and ended up writing us some code that ended up being kind of a workshop for some code that us programmers would have to sit and work on. It allowed non-programmers to set up the same conditions and handled the 'code' part internally. It was all because I was just goofing around with program ideas and eventually got to that point where I had my eureka moment. I didn't set out to waste company time and money, but the end result paid off in droves, which is exactly how it sounds like the deck came to be. Another programmers goofy side project turned into an accounting package that we ended up tying into our actual product. If our boss/owner had been looking at it the way you are describing, none of that would have come to fruition, but look at all the money he would have saved not letting us programmers do what we did. /s

If I owned a multimillion dollar company, probably yeah. There’s a limit but for a groundbreaking company the RCA labs are more a warning of “but they actually have to complete projects at some point and have direction” than a “everything needs to be rigidly directed”.

“Hey I have an idea for something I’d like to exist” is quite possibly one of the best things a business owner can hear out of an R&D engineer’s mouth. You provide oversight in accordance with the risk factors established by your financials, business plan, and how good of an idea it is. But if a bunch of them like it as a product that’s a good sign.