alt Hacker News> It's incredibly difficult to come up with an idea which is both new and not controversial. But nowadays, it is essential, probably more so than at any other time in history. All new ideas must fit precisely within established financial incentive structures. The degree of alignment required, the amount of boxes which must be ticked, is huge.
That's a real issue. In the US today, you have to get to a minimum viable product early and find someone to throw money at it to make it scale fast. Things that take years to make work at all are hard to fund, even at a modest level. Xerography and color TV are technologies that took decades to make work at all.
This is partly the effect of a weakened patent system.
One of the important functions of a government is to act as a backstop for capital-intensive investments with long-term ROIs. The interstate highway system started as Eisenhower's proposal, GPS and the moon mission were funded to one-up the Soviets, Arpanet/Internet was a DoD brainchild, and so on. All of that was enabled by Congresspeople who were willing to carve out a good chunk of the federal budget for large-scale, high-risk, long-tail-reward projects. That sort of thinking has not existed in Congress for some time (least of all during the current "starve the NSF" administration).