For founders, the trick is finding that sweet spot where a problem sounds hard on paper (such as self-driving cars or VR headsets, wooo!), but actually is feasi

For founders, the trick is finding that sweet spot where a problem sounds hard on paper (such as self-driving cars or VR headsets, wooo!), but actually is feasible using current technology... This is how true innovation happens. Like evolution, innovation is not a steady inching forward (though that kind of progress certainly operates continuously in the background), but a series of sudden leaps punctuated by relative stability. Those sudden leaps happen when the right brain is in the right place at the right time to make the right analogy or synthesis with existing ideas. You can't fund people to produce it on command, you can only hope to be among the first to recognize that it has happened and to invest in it at that early point, before the innovation is disseminated. For an approach that does seek to produce innovation on command, see Ken Stanley's work on novelty search: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXQPL9GooyI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXQPL9GooyI