Or, to put another way, we did just fine innovating and inventing and such on our own -- in caves, on the Savannah, on trade routes, as part of tribes or guilds. Innovation and entrepreneurship is as natural a part of life as breathing. If this weren't true, we'd still be hanging around in trees waiting for the big cats to leave their prey.
Of course, you can argue that institutions accelerate this natural ability, but there's a lot of room for doubt over exactly what magic sauce makes people super productive. At the very least we can agree that different folks have different answers to that question. (If there were some "proven" answer, we'd just all copy that and the world would be full of Thomas Edisons) I understand there are a lot of works of fiction and nonfiction that claim to explain why so much innovation happened in such and such a place, but it's easy to say or write something like that. In reality, lots of really smart folks have went at this problem and haven't gotten very far in terms of reproducible results.
I find this line repeated over and over again -- that somehow if there is a lot of innovation in situation X that it naturally follows that we know all about X and why all this innovation happened. I think that's stretching logic a bit too much for my tastes.