Yeah, Marx wasn't shy of stating opinions at all, that's for sure. What is driving the innovation though, in Marx' theory, are the market forces. The bourgeois

Yeah, Marx wasn't shy of stating opinions at all, that's for sure. What is driving the innovation though, in Marx' theory, are the market forces. The bourgeoisie as the class of capital owners has to innovate to stay competitive with one another or perish at the market. That does not mean that they as individual persons have to be actual inventors, or that they really have much of a choice. Marx went to great lengths in the Capital to emphasize that it's not about the individual but the economic forces, e.g. he wrote clearly that the individual capitalist isn't morally bad for exploiting the workers, as he isn't free to chose: If the capitalist were to pay them (significantly) better, he/she would lose out to a competitor who didn't. The whole point of his writings is that the economic reality forms the behaviour of the individual. Marx tried to explain the changes in the world by the underlying changes in the economy. The idea of placing agency at the individual would be dismissed as idealist/bourgeois thinking.