Heck, go back to when Steve Jobs visited the Xerox PARC labs in late 1979 and saw the mouse and windows-computing for the first time.[1] Not that PARC was doing anything commercial with it, but those ideas definitely got incorporated into Apple's products.

Jobs goes to PARC on a Thursday, and on Friday afternoon he is ordering one of his people to create a mouse for him. Now Xerox had invested in Apple and Apple got a tour of their research lab in exchange for that investment, but ideas do have value if you're not executing them efficiently and someone else can.

[1] http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/16/110516fa_fact_...