Very few.
Educating more kids and having more "ideas" won't change that.
We're not lacking ideas. We're lacking the right incentives to make ideas happen.
All those things arguably exist for good reasons, but it's a huge hurdle to doing anything useful.
I can't have a 20 foot radio tower in town, I can't subdivide smaller than 10 acres outside of town, I can't build any facility out there to operate the experimental tower without building permits, radio licenses, compliance with tracking (for the police) any radio customer I might get if I qualify as a "communication service provider", etc.
There are (major) hurdles in just about every conceivable industry, and hardly any provision for "hey I'm a guy who wants to experiment, perhaps even noncommercially".
You can overcome the hurdles, but how many people will just stay at their 9 to 5 and not bother because its a huge pain in the ass with no guaranteed benefit?
I wonder how much this holds us back, it's hard to say.
I strongly suspect we're in a "barriers too high" regime rather than an "incentives are too low" regime, and that our money would be better spent reducing barriers than increasing incentives.
It's like the "one mans trash is another mans treasure" cliche, something that you see as an impediment I see as a social good. Finding the right balance is tricky and unfortunately in a polarized political environment it's easy for people to fall into the far sides of the argument.
I don’t think we need to offer more incentives or reduce barriers per se, but I think we really ought to be talking about refactoring our laws. The amount of legislative “technical debt” is intense and problematic.
For each and every one, someone suffered terribly or died.
We place too high a value on human life, and it's no wonder that we can't accomplish anything when a non-zero level of risk is unacceptable.
This is too close to another formulation of the same thought: "we should allow corporations to kill people for profit, with impunity" for comfort.
You could start by telling us why the statements aren't the same, using examples and facts.
You seem to want to have an abstract, bloodless, clinical discussion of when it is acceptable to kill people in the name of "efficiency" (I will interpret this as "profit").
I can tell you that is a dishonest discussion, if that's what is intended. If you want to have it honestly you will have to first indicate an understanding of exactly, in detail, the most evil things that will happen as a result. Also the most devastating things that will happen and be protected from proportionate legal recourse under your proposed or imagined regime.
It won't be a bloodless conversation.
Policies and regulations aren't made in some Platonic ideal universe, they are made in specific, factual circumstances.
Come back to us when you can talk about how a specific "acceptable" level of risk does not involve enabling evil actors, and indemnified doers for a specific policy area.
Then we'll talk about the specific things you find acceptable, and just whose death and suffering you will trade for profit.
It's like the idea of the FDA setting limits to the amount of insect contaminates allowed in food. At first, it seems disturbing until you realize that if they put a zero tolerance policy in place, there would be near-endless grounds to sue every food manufacturer out of business.
Not only is it unattainable, it's actively counterproductive to try and achieve because of unexamined and unintended consequences.
I don't think this is quite right. More accurately, I think we need to the risk assumer and risk accepter may need to be making the informed decisions.
Too often there is someone making a decision that someone else pays for. You want to strap yourself to a rocket and go into space and you have been communicated the risks and accepted them, that's one thing. It's entirely another when you get into a car running on software that you have no clue about. In the latter case, you aren't making a risk informed decision because the person/corporation determining that the risk is acceptable doesn't flow that information down to you (or, there's limited bandwidth that any one person can make an informed decision about). That's where regulation levels to playing field somewhat to ensure perverse incentives don't cause risks to be accepted by those who don't have to bear them. I or [insert relevant company name here] shouldn't be the decider on what risk you should be (perhaps unwittingly) accepting.
Not only are hurdles a pain, they’re not easily understood.
Edit: beetle juice, not goosebumps
Humans are good at coming up at ideas, the problem is, not all ideas are good ideas. But humans are especially good at ideas to maximize their profit resulting in permits and compliance are written in resulting blood along with the engineering standards enforced.
Unfortunately the threat of jail does not deter those ideas, but putting enough barriers that everyone working under them have to jump through does a really good job at reducing the amount that follow through with them.
The other aspect, it doesn't take much to kill a human. The rules may seem overkill, but a human is a soft squishy fleshbag where tripping on a pencil could kill you.
Tesla's politically-connected Shanghai Gigafactory 3 looks to be going from bare field to production in around a year. Part of that was apparently government inspection being done in parallel with construction, to minimize sign-off delays.
In reality, most important inventions, are efforts of large groups of people(that may be distributed across organizations), and most of it is work - not coming up with a "great" "vision".
// Everyone wants to be a founder
Well, you know the song "asiti":
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=x6ezbFpkGlw
It's on Hebrew, but it basically talks about the Israeli tendency to always say "I did this, I did that"
Not what @aripicker claimed: "... being a founder, which inherently involves inventing ..." No mention of uniqueness.
But so much talent is wasted on insignificant things.
Even at large R&D companies which have the investment, people are still hesitant to invest in new ideas since they simply don't have the money. It works the same way with the government, just at a larger scale.
Many people don't care about any of this though. They just want to live their lives, find something to be passionate about, and die peacefully. You'll always have to fight these people, politically.
We also have to consider the legal ramifications of such things. It is difficult to do ethical R&D.
Perhaps it's also not what our industrial policy is tuned for? In California, if a company kills a project, the staff might go elsewhere to pursue it, but that can be harder in states which enforce non-competes. Similarly, in China, if a supplier drops a product, you might go elsewhere for it, which can be harder in the US which has patent law tuned for exclusivity. A great deal of VR/AR tech has vanished into FAMG, and become unavailable for anyone else in the US to "make ideas happen". Part of why China accepted trade war as the lesser of evils.