A company for which I used to work decided to buy rather than invent some new technology. In this one case, after the principles had taken their money and run, I was asked to look at the IP that money purchased. This came in the form of 8 8" floppy disks (dating me:). At the time I was in a metrics MSc class, so I decided to write a comment stats program, and ran these disks through it. With a alarming result - precisely 1 comment. And when I searched it out, it was this:

"I don't know why this works"

Oops. After that they put me at the front end due diligence instead of the back end.