1. Surprising to see an article on innovation that mentions Kickstarter only as a footnote. One of the reasons we lack innovation is because we've let one group of people, big name venture capital investors, to decide by themselves what's good and what isn't. It's important to note that the modern "VC" investment model had very little to do with the major innovations of the 20th century. Some of our greatest inventions came from government laboratories, people working on their own without organized investment and corporations who acted like VCs by internally funding good ideas. Modern VCs only appeared around the 80s to give us derivative works that succeeded by added branding to existing ideas. The beauty of Kickstarter et al is that we have a much larger pool of people to tell us what's good or bad, but it does no good if we keep looking down on crowdfunding as venture capital's weaker sibling. We need to focus more on "how much good do they do" than on "how much money did they raise"
2. Another reason we don't have much innovation is because "Inventor" is no longer a job title. Back in the days of (my hero) Thomas Edison you didn't need a VC firm or a trendy office to justify your intentions to make something new. You just did it, with no particular funding or social organization. People decided to dedicate their lives to the pursuit of making new and original things. Now it's so important to be a part of the "startup community", important to have social validation from big name vcs, important to never say no to any amount of money. Until people can declare themselves to be Inventors without all of the other trappings, we shouldn't expect unbounded innovation from them.
3. This line struck me "...one guy saying that they were going to do these crazy things like ship a phone with no keyboard running a real OS and require everyone to buy a data plan."
Another reason we don't innovate any more is because minor changes to an existing product now count as the the most significant innovations of our time. I understand that we need heroes and Steve Jobs is one of them. And a lot of people like the iphone. But Thomas Edison invented recorded sound. Tesla harnessed electricity and energy beams. Freaking Ben Franklin invented the concept of a lending library. And the best our generation has is something about a phone OS and data plan?
We can't expect the next generation to be true innovators when we direct all of our hero worship at people who make small improvements to existing ideas. Yes, this may mean one of your heroes too. But if we can't even make the sacrifice of focusing on those who actually do invent new things, how can we be expected to be so creative ourselves?
Finally, innovation isn't completely dead. People are working on fusion reactors, warp drives and brain interfaces. Their efforts just don't draw as much attention of big VC investments or the work of big name entrepreneurs. The biggest things that innovation is lacking are things that our society can provide.