I get what you mean, but my original thought was about complexity as in how much effort (work & time & money) would it take to re-create the thing and start a c

I get what you mean, but my original thought was about complexity as in how much effort (work & time & money) would it take to re-create the thing and start a competing business, given you already have all the necessary knowledge. Cause it increasingly feels like working on state-of-the-art is only achievable by big players... Under these assumptions it's not really being bleeding edge, how much research went into it, or how hard of a science is behind that make it complex, but rather the amount of components and parts needed to assemble it (and in case of hardware also the rarity of them). When I am talking about state-of-the-art technology there I just mean the newest competitive version of a thing that most people use daily...