I interpret you as saying you are a VC investor.
Indeed, personally, as a historical inventor and arguably an innovator myself, I think innovation, or actually the lack of it has become existential. So I heartily agree completely with your enthusiasm for it.
But it shouldn't be something that requires to be backed by VC investment, just something we all want or need.
I know I am not alone in this, most people have the potential to be innovators if only they had the time and money to indulge experimenting with their ideas.
Only they truly understand their ideas, VC investors can only know what the innovator chooses to tell them technically, because usually the innovator is a unique specialist in their subject, by definition, often by lifelong research, only they might know what is the state of the art.
Musk is obviously trying to prove the exception, but time will tell, the longevity of his products and companies will be the proof in the pudding.
Tesla cars are cool but not the solution to the global energy problem by themselves, we should be careful not to allow their success to date affect evaluations of what needs to happen next, to fix the energy problem. For example we might think batteries with electric motors could scale up to one day being used on commercial airliners, when this is impossible due to the bumblebee scaling issue (if we scaled up a bumblebee, it wouldn't fly).
But we need to ditch oil, so there has to be another fuel for aerospace, which would fit in with a move to solar energy, it looks like hydrogen.
But hydrogen is currently seen as incredibly expensive, including famously by Musk, who is on record as saying hydrogen is "stupid".
But the energy needs of aerospace outweigh the energy needs of cars, it's what aerospace needs that should determine what goes into cars, not the other way around, otherwise we have a situation a little like the tail wagging the dog.
Anyhow there is a lot we could cover here before we even got onto the technical details of things like hydrogen.
What takes precedence, is money, it seems to me there is something fundamentally wrong with it, because money is energy, always, physically, but we only treat it as such when it suits us.
And when we audit it all out, aligning money with energy as it should be, since energy can never be destroyed or created, it looks like the practice of VC investment is fully dependent on this flaw of money.
It is actually a pretty big problem, if only what is profitable is what is invested in, because profit itself is the problem with money, it's an energy con done to the planet.
When money makes money, energy also has to have been gained, since money is energy always, physically.
But the planet is the only thing that can give out more energy than it receives put in. So the planet is the losing party of every profitable transaction, and every profitable transaction pushes up the temperature just a little bit more.
Profit has to go, to fix the global energy problem.
It goes when we start to issue solar indexed stimulus, there seems no way around that, when all the Systems Engineering is done, this is what we need to do to monetise energy which does not respond to profit but is given for free, nothing asked in return for it by the donor.