Researchers are innovators. In fact, innovators aren't people any more. They are giant conglomerate corporations and huge money fueled industries made by greedy corporate types. Where do you think most of our medical drugs come from? Some mad scientist in a basement lab? Where do you think stealth fighters and spacecraft come from? A junkyard inventor with a welder? The days of Da Vinci and Edison are gone. The days of a single innovator with the funds and ability to come up with a life changing development don’t happen anymore. I work in a VERY niche industry and is as fertile a breeding ground for innovative development as any other. There a few individuals that make minor innovative developments that plod the industry a micrometer at a time, but nothing near on the grand scale to which you refer to as “respectable”. The vast majority of the major development are made by faceless companies with large pockets of cash to throw a lot of R&D, using a TEAM of people all doing only a fraction of the actual development and incidentally doing it concurrently with their mundane day to day work. Innovations aren’t sprung forth in a flash. They slowly developed over years and years, often changing through many hands.
I don’t know how old you are, or how long you’ve been in the workforce, but you have a very simplistic and idealistic view of what it is like out in the industry. It is a dirty, gritty world where lines between greed, innovation, advancement, selfishness, development and cruelty are all blurred. The very same type of “innovators” and “entrepreneurs” you say you respect, are the very same type of people who stepped on or took advantage of people beneath them on their way up. You have to because it is a dog-eat-dog world.
