You're not alone. Alan Kay asks if there's been any new ideas in computer science in the past 50 years: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/432922/significant-

You're not alone. Alan Kay asks if there's been any new ideas in computer science in the past 50 years: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/432922/significant-new-inventions-in-computing-since-1980 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/432922/significant-new-i... He'd previously named spreadsheets and all the stuff from PARC: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/357813/remembering-a-quote-from-alan-kay https://stackoverflow.com/questions/357813/remembering-a-quo... --- We're probably in a commercialization/application phase of ideas. For example, lisp ideas are still being applied in other languages. Perhaps all the low-hanging fruit has been gotten? Or perhaps it's a bit like DNA and RNA transfer: the most ancient part of all livings things. It's probably not optimal, but you make faster progress by building atop it rather than starting over. Similar for cell structure, multicellular organization, neurons (worms have 'em), vertebrate anatomy, mammal design etc. Industry has a habit of reinventing the same ideas every decade or so, in a different language, operating system etc. --- There are new ideas, though mostly a combination of existing ideas at this point. The last example I noticed, several years ago, was jq, which applies unix streams and haskell to json processing. (Though its author wasn't an entrepreneur.) --- I suspect there are golden ideas just one or two steps off the beaten track. But how much work they'd be to productize (and whether the market would adopt them) is another question... If no one else is doing it, it's an opportunity - for you.