Unless the organisation is on the brink of collapse there is valuable learning and understanding in honestly attempting the research. If nothing else one gets a bit more knowledge on how to research the topic, although some knowledge of the state of the field is hard to avoid if you're so new to it that it's resource intensive to research.

For the company it would probably pay off better (over time) to let the people who regularly get stuck after trying nothing spend some energy figuring out than what they get in return for shipping them to conferences.