If you want to find ground-breakingly new tech & ideas, don't look at your average 2012 startup. Look at PhD dissertations or the output of Microsoft/Google/IBM

If you want to find ground-breakingly new tech & ideas, don't look at your average 2012 startup. Look at PhD dissertations or the output of Microsoft/Google/IBM research. Those people are paid for new ideas that don't make money. :-) Real ground-breaking tech comes from deep work & deep knowledge. It also comes from trying out ideas and watching the "99 lightbulbs that don't work". It turns out failing costs money, and groundbreaking work is hard to fund. In general, that is sort of the idea behind research labs not producing monetizing products: all they do is work up ideas. Maybe the ideas are usable, but statistically, most of those ideas aren't going to make money. Think very hard about that. As an investor or a founder, you have to be prepared to lose your money on some faffy idea that might be so far beyond the current worldstate that no one would buy it. The interested reader is advised to examine Common Lisp company history in the '80s for a classic case study. Or, alternatively, the Connection Machine. Real innovation/groundbreaking ideas are exotic (a priori, this is what makes them the real deal). So there must be some sort of ability on the part of the company to transform the society into being ready for this idea. Put another way, research is even more black swan than startups.