By "society" I mean how once something is invented legisliation gets put up all around it making it more difficult for upstarts.
You have to be a lot smarter to be on the frontier but there are fewer rules. AI, blockchain, and VR/AR all seem to be on the frontier.
Starting a business that relies on the edge of the frontier raises the stakes, higher risk and higher reward.
If you guess right that the market is going this direction you can get a head start on defining the new direction and you have little or no competition. However, it is very difficult to get all of the following right: technology, general market direction, timing of readiness to accept a new technology or process, brand desirability/acceptance and willingness to spend money on your innovation.
I have done some arguably cool innovative things at the edge. But here I am still selling my time. It is really tough to get them all correct.
One of the best ideas that didn't really work out came out of a casual conversation with a tech friend and my statistical background combined with his programming background suggested that we should just try it. The proof of concept worked. No one else seemed to be doing what we developed and competing techniques didn't get as good of answers. The application would have been in search. But at the time no one had yet made significant money in search. Google was still burning through VC cash and the investors that we had access to just couldn't see how search would ever become a big business.
In the end, we just walked away and went back to making a living in more ordinary manner. About 7 or 8 years later the kind of techniques/technology finally became hot with VC firms but we were not in a good place to circle back around.
So that is a long answer to "making money" versus having "fun". Building the proof of concept was mostly just for fun. After seeing cool results we spent some time and effort trying to figure out if it could be a business. In retrospect it feels like we should have found a way to persist.
But in order for something to be salable, lots of people have to like it. If you are always on the leading edge you might be more in to research than business. There might even be grants available to help fund it. There are research laboratories that build things and then those inventions are used for entirety different purposes. The example I was given were the airport scanners could have been used in malls for fashion instead.
"Better", for now, might be business that elevates worker and consumer rights while still making a profit (or being non-profit).
As you mentioned blockchain, it's vastly driven by speculation (including manipulation), marking it a sign, in my opinion, of a dire state of capitalism as Marx explained best. Real estate markets are in a similar cycle.