Originally Posted by
patentcad
Incorrect. Take Cervelo, a company that almost surely has annual gross sales that can't be much over $100 million, yet they pony up what probably amounts to $1-$2 million ++ to sponsor and supply gear to a top UCI team. That's also a critical part of their R&D where they get feedback from world class cyclists on their prototypes. Specialized sponsors UCI racing (the minimum cost to sponsor a UCI team for a bike manufacturer is now $1 million in cash PLUS the gear they have to provide, so it has to be in the $1.2 million+ range), until recently so was Scott, and Cannondale is also sponsoring UCI racers. Big bucks, and they all use those pro teams as testing grounds for product development.
You might count the team sponsorship as R&D (I do agree that they do get helpful input from the pro riders), but I count it as marketing, as would RadioShack, Astana, and most of the other non bike-affiliated teams.
I'll bet their true R&D outside of the team sponsorships is close to 2% of their gross sales, if even that. Even 'big pharma' which has a lot to gain from R&D, invests <10% (they used to go up to 15% but times have gone lean) in the R&D pipeline, and even of that, most of it is into industry-scaling research that is directly applicable to profits and not true novel R&D (almost all the new drug classes are sponsored by government funding - big pharma poaches off their findings and makes knockoffs with their 'research.')