Sounds like you're doing all of the right things. Try reading material from outside your primary interests: biology, pure maths, civil engineering, electronics,

Sounds like you're doing all of the right things. Try reading material from outside your primary interests: biology, pure maths, civil engineering, electronics, chemistry, etc. Ideas are not born in a vacuum and over-specialization can sometimes give you the illusion of progress. I find digging into a new subject exciting and it often gives me new connections or angles to programming and maths that I wouldn't have otherwise encountered before. As for commercial applications... well software for business is usually dry and boring grunt work. Interesting, innovative, and challenging are, paradoxically, antithetical to commercial software. You want reliable, boring, and simple. Perhaps you need to look for a research position or take a risk and start a venture based on one of your ideas.