[Aerkuld]

I've had experience with engineering consultants which confirms your observation. At my former company they hired a company of crazy Russian consultants to take a look at one of our projects and come up with 'fresh' ideas for product cost saving. They got paid a ridiculous amount of money and over a six month period came up with probably 25 ideas.

Straight off the bat 25% of those ideas were so absurd that they'd take years to develop and even then wouldn't be acceptable to the customer. This was despite the consultants being told that this is a conservative industry which was highly resistant to obvious and dramatic change.

Of the remaining ideas I am not exaggerating when I say that every single one of them had already been thought of by our own engineering group very early on in the project. Every one of these had already been prototyped and dismissed either for cost, complexity, or some obvious technical problem that was encountered during the investigation.

They were then asked to develop four of five of the ideas they had that management felt most likely to succeed. Their development found exactly the same problems our own engineering group had found and one by one the ideas fell by the wayside.

The end result was that our management spent several hundred thousand dollars to conclude bugger all except that our own engineering group knew what they were doing.

Brilliant!