Former IBM Research employee here (At the turn of the last century, and I did database stuff for them, not research). They spent 6 billion dollars a year on research. They had a chip fab in my building (Yorktown NY) which had chemists, physicist, mathematicians... The really seemed to be struggling to try and turn that R&D into profits though.

The hot new thing at IBM was "global services" consulting. Since I left they've sold they're chip business, laptop business and really doubled down on consulting..