I worked at a company that did chip design work for contract. Our bright biz dev director tried to land a deal with Huawei. Huawei kept asking detailed questions about how we would design certain features that they wanted in their chips. So our genius management would assign some of our engineers work out conceptual designs to show Huawei, detailed enough that you could jump right into HDL coding of them. It went on and on. No contract ever materialized. Many engineering hours were spent doing a fairly signicant portion of the designs.