One example: a lot of the smartest computer scientists of the 1960s were really into algorithmic art as a side-project hobby. Was algorithmic art mainstream in the 1970s? No. Hell, it isn't even mainstream today.
Usually, it's written off as being non-monetizable, too much of a toy to do actual work, "why would anyone do that?", "I don't have any friends that do that", etc.
Search was considered non-monetizable at first. That's why internet giants of the 90's, like Yahoo, were focused on being portals.
PCs were considered too much of a toy to actually do any type of work. Back then, you did serious work on shared on on mainframes.
Radios, when shown to initial investors had one quip, "Why would I want to send messages to nobody in particular?"
When TV was shown to the same innovators in radio, they didn't think it would ever catch on.
Whether large numbers are divisible by primes seems like a useless branch of mathematics called number theory, but we found it useful for encryption. Without it, we wouldn't have online commerce, for math started 2 or 3 centuries ago, when there was no online commerce.
Point is, innovation happens when people try new and different things, even if they're weird. Even if they seem useless. Even if no one else is doing them. Even if people think it's stupid. Even if it doesn't make you money. Because there's something else that's motivating you to explore.
You don't have to be smart to try new weird things, but smart people tend to not worry about what other people think and go ahead and try new things.
Perhaps your quibble is the order of the statement. It's defn true that not all things that smart people do in their free time become something mainstream. But it's defn true that everything that we do nowadays, it was, at one time, something some smart person was already doing years ago.
So if you ever spot someone doing something seemingly weird, strange, useless, non-montetizable, but defn new, then stop yourself from being a cynic because it might be something you end up doing yourself in 10 years, as improbable as that seems now.
I don't know why cdixon wrote the article. But I suspect that it's only not an exciting claim to you because you're already at a certain place in your understanding of innovation. I think there are plenty of people that believe innovation happens when an inventor hides away in a basement and tinkers with stuff, and one day, he has a big reveal and the world says how awesome it is. That story's reinforced when you tell the story of successes looking backwards.
In reality, early innovation doesn't look like that. It looks like people doing weird things you don't understand, or seems like they're wasting their time, doing things that seem to have nothing to do with the real world. The only thing in common is that they seem to be doing it for shits and giggles, while having lots of fun.
I'm not sure why this is, exactly. Perhaps it's just more fun to be cynical and shoot down the weird things that other people are doing. Or maybe people don't actually like change. Or maybe people don't like being wrong, and if you poo poo most everything, it's likely you'll be right, since most things aren't mainstream game changers. Or perhaps people don't like hyperbole. I know I have my bullshit flag raised when someone's raving about something.
And indeed, with regards to radio, an operating radio station was built merely a year after the inventor received a patent for the first successful method of radio transmission (and within a decade of the first successful radio transmission). The first television station was built within 3 years after the first working TV (capable of showing moving images) was built.
Search was not considered non-monetizable; it simply was not as monetizable as a portal based on the technology prevalent when Yahoo--or even Google--launched. Google did not invent the business of bidding for search terms--it licensed the Overture's keyword bidding technology and later bought Applied Semantics (which developed and commercialized the technology that is now known as Adsense), which is what allowed it to monetize search. (If Yahoo hadn't granted Google that license, Google wouldn't be here today.)
"By 1916, along with Armstrong and de Forest, [David Sarnoff] was using his newfound fame to push the idea of commercial radio, something he called the "wireless music box," although this idea was before its time. Even as late as 1920, one potential investor wrote him to say, "The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?" Even the Marconi Company, his employer, rejected the idea of radio as anything but a communications medium. So he went to work for the Radio Corporation of America [RCA] in 1920. -- Radio Pioneers enter story of the wire on David Sarnoff's associates in response to his urgings for investment in radio." http://www.radioworld.com/article/radio-pioneers-enter-story...
"While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially I consider it an impossibility, a development of which we need waste little time dreaming." -- Wikiquotes -- Lee DeForest, American radio pioneer and inventor of the vacuum tube, http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Incorrect_predictions#Televisio...
As for the PC, I don't have a quote. But I remember IBM was the way "serious people" had their computational needs met, and it was not PCs.
I never made claims that Google invented the business of bidding for search terms. It is true that search was considered non-monetizable, or if you like, less monetizable. Either way, it wasn't considered fertile ground for making money, but there were people trying anyway--which is my point:
Smart people try things that don't make money, aren't cool, seem weird, etc, and while not all of them will be mainstream in the future, there's a good chance that a some of them will be.
Things that have value (to people in general) are monetizable.
That would explain why not all interesting things are monetizable.