Primarily, the people doing innovation for innovation's sake right now are the guys who've already made their fuck-you millions or billions, and can now afford to fund out-there research. Folks like Paul Allen, Elon Musk, (to a certain extent) Peter Thiel, Sir Richard Branson, etc. Sure, there's occasionally a commercial motive behind some of their side projects -- but not always, and often as a pipedream. In a way, it is refreshing to see people's throwing money at pipedreams simply to make them ever so slightly more realistic. Will Branson make space flight affordable to the masses in his lifetime? Almost certainly not. But he realized that if he didn't kickstart the process, it would have taken the world a lot longer to get started.