Much food for thought. Thank you for your insights.

I think of your question a bit differently. There's a book by Thonas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn talks about the difference between innovation within a paradigm, and creating a new paradigm. An example is the laws of gravity, postulated by Newton. You can incrementally add to the Newtonian paradigm. Or you can break through to a new paradigm, which is what Einstein did. So there are two types of innovations, those that elaborate on the current assumptions, but the more world shaking "innovations" basically break the mold.