The world needs powerful new ideas and people willing to bring those ideas to everyone through creation of products and services. We need BOTH but it's getting harder to build a career focusing on inventing and discovering new ideas nowadays unfortunately.

This is documented super well in this book (published by Stripe Press!): https://www.amazon.com/Scientific-Freedom-Civilization-Donal...

Highly recommend reading Scientific Freedom (published by Stripe Press in fact) which touches on the important topic of the shrinking freedom in professionalized scientific research:

https://www.amazon.com/Scientific-Freedom-Civilization-Donal...

Donald Braben's book touches on what's changed pretty well I felt (published by Stripe press too): https://www.amazon.com/Scientific-Freedom-Civilization-Donal...