I get asked by young #entrepreneurs what is the cost and the output of R&D activities and how long would it take to reach certain milestones? There is considerable variability in the amount of investment in R&D needed to generate a patentable #invention 1/7 🦋 When we started @Metamaterialtec with @timaras we found that #IBM spent about $6 billion on R&D in 2011 and generated 6,146 patents, implying an average R&D cost per patent of $976,000. At same year #Qualcomm, spent $2.3 billion on R&D and generated 1,000 patents, 2/7 🦋