Can't you sell it next year? And you know what? At some point somebody has to lose money to the tax collector. You can't deduct everything, can't shunt it all onto the customer (typically a leaf-node employee, someone at the bottom of an org chart). The business has to be profitable by enough that it can eat some taxation. Or what, you expect the orphan to do it instead?

Has to push through friction for others. And plus, cost of goods of unsold inventory isn't that painful if you actually are making huge margins on it, like you ideally should, because you built a better mousetrap that was that much better that you could protect it from copycats with patents and therefore let everyone benefit enormously from it.

In the end, the businessman must be creative. Must be an inventor, basically. Or a leader. And so in order to overcome that friction for the sake of the orphanage, the businessman must resolve friction in nature, some inefficiency of some sort, something that could be much better than it is. Something ineffective that could be effective. Plant a seed and reap two.