An alternate way to look at the problem is that perhaps we should be doing a better job of educating our children to absorb the existing state of knowledge. The

An alternate way to look at the problem is that perhaps we should be doing a better job of educating our children to absorb the existing state of knowledge. The hope would be that they are prepared to contribute new ideas before their naive optimism is crushed and they head toward seeking rent on old ideas. The underlying theory here is that new ideas are discovered by reinterpretration of the underlying data with a "purer" or partially forgotten version of previous explanations.