like countless hundreds of quotes on execution vs ideas, here is one: "Ideas don’t make you rich. The correct execution of ideas does."
anyways, i'm gonna spend a little more time this evening to really dig in.
I am unaware of any of the ideas having been picked up and productized. I might be mistaken.
However, if I'm correct, then the thing that could be better is picking ideas that have a high chance of being selected, everything else being equal.
For example, this is Vlad Magdalin, one of the founders of Webflow:
> But I won’t claim credit that it was some magical insight that I had. It was a specific video that I saw that I think every maker and every creator should see called “Inventing on Principal” by Bret Victor. Seeing that talk, it’s a maybe 50-minute talk around creating games and doing animation and this broader concept of direct manipulation, but more importantly the principal behind why you do the work you do, what drives you.
> Seeing that video and being a designer and a 3D animator and a developer all at once, it just sparked that idea of, “holy crap.” The kinds of tools that we can have in animation land, the kind of tools we already have for game design and level design, the tools we have in digital publishing, all those things can be married together to front end and back end development and make it a much more human type of interface. That’s when it was boom, this has to be a product and a thing.
(source: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/144-vlad-magdalin-of-we...)
Some ideas—key novel concepts and conceptual frameworks, for example—absolutely have value, but they're not valuable in the way a business is valuable. You won't become business-owner rich just by coming up with the right concept, but you can have a successful research career, get enough funding to run a small research group, win a Nobel/etc prize... etc. But that says more about how our society and economy are organized than it does about the inherent value of ideas qua ideas.
The skills, personalities, organizing principles, and methods involved are substantially different, and focusing on making a product has a tendency to cut off many conceptually valuable lines of inquiry based on financial motivations.
Notice that Bret Victor's goal (like most researchers) is not to become as rich as possible.
Whether researchers or product developers ultimately have more leverage is something of a chicken-and-egg question. To make an analogy, it's like asking who was more influential, Karl Marx or Otto von Bismarck.
As the ancients said:
A wise man plants trees he won’t live to see fully grown, and a greedy man overfertilizes trees in a mad dash to get the tree purchased by a faceless investor before anyone notices it’s sick.