Exactly. Often it is not the innovators that end up benefiting from showing everyone the value of a new idea (1). Most innovative work is very long term and the

Exactly. Often it is not the innovators that end up benefiting from showing everyone the value of a new idea (1). Most innovative work is very long term and there are simply not many channels to fund such work. Innovation is often too far up the pipeline for the originators to reliably extract value. As you point out, the original innovators of the internet and desktop computing are not the ones that ended up with the bulk of the rewards. Douglas Engelbart and his team innovated, originated and practically invented all of modern computing paradigms and interactions. Engelbert died unable to garner interest in his grander vision of accelerative bootstrapping. I suspect he saw modern incarnations as bizarro implementations, outwardly similar imitations apart in spirit. Those like Bret Victor recognize that spirit. This list shows some of that spirit. I would argue RapGenius qualifies too. Here's hoping this picks up as a trend. Google and Apple both innovates like crazy I would dispute that Google and Apple innovate like crazy. They do more polishing and acquiring, with most of the innovative work in service of the product, a benefit but not a new paradigm. Voice recognition, self driving cars, heads up displays, multi-touch,internet blimps. For the dozens of researchers who devoted decades of their lives to this work, the recognition Google and Apple get for things on like that list is bittersweet. This is not to dispute the tremendous innovative thinking and work it takes to package research to a public ready state, I am merely pointing out that true bellwether innovations (2) often go disproportionately unrewarded. (1) With a negative income tax and library->hackerspaces, that would very often be perfectly ok. Such people are moved more by vision than by monetary rewards. (2) Which will themselves be combinations of existing things, the key is they should be the first to inspire with this combination, even if in very rough form. By this definition pagerank and the iphone are the key innovations of Google and Apple.