The innovator who dreams the idea and starts the R&D, dragging the idea from the chaos of possibility to present it to the stunned and wide-eyed public is almost never the man who should commercialize that idea.  He would be depressed if he did.  Think about NACA and NASA.  Cowboys in the sky, brilliant back-room boys, incessantly prodding the limits of science.
Now, consider the behemoth bureaucracy it has become.  Perhaps it must be so, perhaps brilliance must give way to methodology or the gains will not be sustained, but it is so hard to see it happen.  How do you have the spark coexist with the slow fire of sustained steady growth and "return on investment"?  What is the return to the man who has invested himself in the idea?  How can he be compensated?  By doing it again.  Blessed is the organization that can retain him, harness him, and not crush him.

 

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