Andrew we need to be blind to be working in any technical capacity, and not see the amount of good ideas which have been lost to commercial pressures and "Competition". It is simply staggering to try to think of it.
I wrote a story a while ago likening what we see in most cases of competition to the end of a cycling road-race.
All teams work in reasonable collaboration throughout the race, maintaining a far higher speed than any individual can, or even any single team, but then when the finishing line approaches, all start to play cat and dog, waiting for a team or individual to break free, behind whom a pack can shelter saving energy until final few hundred metres sprint.
The end result is an overall journey time that is actually slower than a good team or even an exceptional individual.
As a would-be innovator and ex-patentee (And former competition cyclist) myself, I gave up trying to compete on a technical level many years ago.
In truth, it isn't the best/ most influential technologies and solutions that come to us, only the most profitable, to the "Owners" of the technology.
In truth, no-one really should have the right to claim a technology or any kind of knowledge to themselves, as almost everything in our heads is as a result of hundreds of thousands of years of evolution of our entire species. But the problem is, once one starts to claim possesion, all have to do the same, or worse, to prevent the initial claimers taking everything. That is colonialism, and capitalism, unfortunately, and it is practiced by all political sides for the same reasons.
A system which truly rewarded technical merit, rather than profitability, would push forward technology at a far faster rate than we've seen.
If Nikolai Tesla had been allowed to bring us internet like communications 120 years ago, together with free power, he might have been still with us now, together with Einstein and all the other historical greats, and all geniuses since, who died in two world wars, and too many other skirmishes and profit driven mistakes that have cost millions of lives.
Tesla's funding was removed by JP Morgan, because they didin't like the idea of free power, from which no profit could be made, in case you didn't know.
And here we are, with planet burninig, still practicing the old profit / debt / scarcity enforcement business model, even with things like vaccinations.
To be honest, though the article that sparked this conversation is about an amazing technology, the truth is we could have all the same benefits by plugging into the natural fusion reactor in the sky using mature solar farm technology, at a fraction of the price. After that, then there might be real hope, and all resources needed to achieve fusion.
Sorry for my rambling response, but this competition thing is something we should see as now existentially threatening.
We practice profit, which is facilitated by capital, which is the stored energy of our planet, which was put there for free by the sun, using the gear-chain of money, which we absolutely worship, then we wonder why our planet is burning, literally, from the energy of the sun.
Why do still so many not seem to be able to see this?
We should stop all profit driven activity right now, including all "Renewable", "Green", and "Carbon neutral" profit driven activities; plug into the sun with appropriate infrastructure, shower everyone with solar powered proof of work tokens, then let them choose what to do after that.
Then things like fusion, interplanetary space travel, and relative immortality might have a chance.
In fact, then just humanity might have a chance.
The banks could do it tomorrow if they announced the debt of humanity is actually an energy deficit to our planet that can only be paid back down by solar energy, and from that point on, all money is freely issued, provided we all work towards the goal of implementing solar.
Call it communism, socialism, whatever, the banks are already in charge, nothing need change there, if they were somehow to see what is the right thing, the responsible thing to do, all could be sorted.
