There is a difference between breakthroughs and incremental development. Breakthroughs threaten entrenched interests while incremental development enriches them. What we take for innovation today are actually incremental improvements on established products lines. Breakthroughs are difficult for businesses as well as government because they destroy working profit and power centers and replace them with expense and uncertainty, yet that is the only way forward.
Real breakthroughs do not come from Big Science. Big Science, like Big Business, is simply scientific work that relies on large budgets, large staffs, and an administration to manage it all. I don't mean to put it down. Much important work gets accomplished and there are brilliant people involved but primarily Big Science is in the business of incremental work - fleshing out and detailing accepted paradigms. That type of work does require facilities and staff, and it seems that the finer the distinctions one is probing, the greater the expense. I trust my life to their work every day. We all do today.
Breakthroughs happen solely in the mind. They are a different way of seeing things. They are just the beginning of the scientific process. It helps to be knowledgeable (you do have to be able to explain your thoughts in ways that can be understood) but knowledge also blinds us. We may feel that we finally have the truth of nature and our ideas seem so complete and all-encompassing but inevitably there is more to the universe than we thought and someone opens a new way of seeing things and the same old things we were so familiar with transform in our minds into something entirely new. What we thought was so perfect and complete becomes just a degenerate case of a different way of thinking. The universe didn't change, how we think did. If the new paradigm holds up with experience then it becomes the province of science, sometimes Big Science, to show that it works (or doesn't) and if it works to wrangle out the fine details and engineer usefulness from it. That can sometimes get expensive, but that first thought was free for the taking, if you were open to it - and if you are stubborn enough to survive the onslaught of naysayers and vested interests.
Big Science may (eventually and grudgingly!) incrementally build on those breakthroughs, but it never produces them. Real breakthroughs come from the mind of a single person who, in addition to being knowledgeable and capable of critical thinking, is enough removed to be able to see what is so obvious that no one pays it any attention. It doesn't require huge labs, funds, staff, and lots of buttons and flashing lights. It requires a person able to have a thought, a thought that no one else has ever had. It requires a person who can see the obvious in a way no one else has bothered to (or is willing to) and who is stubborn enough to take the time to think it through for the sheer satisfaction of it and communicate it in spite of all the negativity that will be thrown at them.
The scientific method is a great way to sort out great ideas, but it needs creative thinkers who challenge accepted wisdom and can express their thoughts clearly to feed it. We also need to be open to those new ideas - at least enough to understand, appreciate, and apply some rigor to them. It's a shame that neither is a focus in our schools nor promoted in our cultures.
Breakthroughs happen in language - in the stories we weave - and not with things. Labs happen later to manifest, test, and refine those ideas. The next real breakthrough will not come from a well funded project but rather from where we least expect it and it will change everything.
One cannot raise a lot of money today on ideas that are too far off the beaten path and a breakthrough, by definition, is off the beaten path. As a potential investor once told me, "It is only prudent to put your money into what is known to work." In general that is probably a good thing. Einstein didn't fit in to what was expected of him and had to find his own way. Einstein was not a part of the Big Science of his day when he did his breakthrough early work. Today he would be called a hobbyist or amateur. Later, as his ideas were shown to be useful and successful and became accepted, he certainly did become an important part of the establishment.
Physics fascinated him. Working in that patent office he was exposed to a lot of diverse ideas that constantly pushed his thoughts into areas that wouldn't be considered relevant otherwise. He could not stop thinking about what it would be like to ride on a beam of light. He couldn't let go of that question and eventually started seeing things and putting ideas together in ways that others did not because they were too entrenched in "what we already know." Breakthroughs are not about what we know (although they must accommodate that) but rather what we have never thought. Time does not pass for a light beam. Did you know that when you look at a star (for real, not a photo or through a device) that you are, in a very real sense, actually touching that star at the very moment it created that light? We are surrounded by magic and wonder if only we bother to notice it!
This country's strength lies in its diversity. Nowhere else (except perhaps Russia and China where it has not yet had a chance to flourish) can we find such a breadth of experience, history, culture, and beliefs to draw on. What we lack are the mechanisms and the will to take advantage of it. Schools, currently focused on job skills and passing tests, do not teach the thinking skills needed to create breakthroughs or draw on that diversity. They punish questioning authority and straying too far from accepted ways. Our culture does not foster those skills. The popular media teaches that violence is always the ultimate arbiter, not a better way of thinking. Those in power have found in divisiveness, ignorance, and fear a powerful tool with which to amass ever more power and wealth for themselves creating a culture that is anathema to breakthrough solutions. Drawing from knowledge gained from decades of research in the innumerable fields of study that we have already funded and undertaken we know there are tools to not only bridge the divides but to synthesize and put to powerful use what seem at first to be contradictions, to build and act out of paradigms that incorporate and treat disparate ontologies as different viewpoints into the same domain. Instead of creating ways to work together accommodating and taking pride in opposing views and lifestyles and using our sometimes contradictory strengths strategically for the good of all, we put all our efforts into converting anyone "different" to "the one true way." Getting your way at the expense of others is considered an accomplishment. With exquisite balanced meals of the finest ingredients before us we are choosing diet soda with fried twinkies over and over again instead.
It is a shame that education, and our society in general, is so focused on manufacturing wage slaves and prisoners and soldiers and leaders solely to support the accumulation of wealth, something that is entirely a human fiction. It has become the given that is so obvious that no one even sees it or questions it anymore even though it has no reality outside of our minds. There is only so much capacity of thought we each have and not grooming and promoting that childish questioning and curiosity to see what the universe has already put in front of our face that we just don't bother to notice is perhaps the greatest tragedy of our time. It may ultimately be our doom.
Things are further exacerbated by the global decline of intelligence over the last century, probably, similar to the Roman Empire, caused by poisons in our food, water, and the very air we breathe and the decline of an educational system at the mercy of a politic that values producing "worker bees" over intelligent thinking human beings achieving the pinnacle that should be their heritage. As an example, one of the planks of the Republican Party of Texas is to outlaw the teaching of critical thinking in schools: "We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills, critical thinking skills and similar programs that ... have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority." - 2012 [TEXAS] STATE REPUBLICAN PARTY PLATFORM. Another example would be Wisconsin's former governor Scott Walker attempting to change the mission of that State's University System to focus on workplace rather than academic skills. Another impediment is the reliance on violent means to achieve goals that we see promoted in popular media and the utter lack of the teaching of techniques to peacefully resolve disputes with frameworks beneficial to all involved. Replacing critical thinking and the freedom to challenge fixed beliefs with unswerving allegiance to stated authority coupled with leadership that sees violence and intimidation as the ultimate means to achievement leads to nothing less than a return to a new dark age.
It is worth noting that the root word of "authority" is "author." Authority is nothing more than the story that is accepted and believed by most. To move forward it MUST be challenged or nothing can change. What we know is minuscule compared to what the universe has available for us, but to grow we must stretch beyond the roots that hold us down. “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
To that end government has an obligation to ensure that all of its citizens not only have the knowledge and well-being they need to be functional and productive citizens but also have the tools they need to use that knowledge to craft, maintain, and create a better future, one that may be unthinkable to us today - a future that arises out of breakthroughs we can't imagine today. The answer starts in education, not just with children but as an ongoing lifelong process. But to be effective citizens it is also necessary to ensure that all people have access to health care. Sick and suffering citizens cannot focus on making good decisions or creating better tomorrows. Basic health care must be divorced from profit making and political power. People have a right to choose what they want to do with their own bodies but require good education resources and personal well-being to be effective empowered citizens. The well-being of the government is a direct reflection of the well-being of its citizens.