Of course a well-funded, modest task may be easier to accomplish than this same task with limited funding where inventiveness becomes far more important. None of their inventions were really patentable, although after a horrendous legal fight, the Wright brothers did finally get a patent, but it was never a commercial success and has little to do with why they should be so profoundly admired. The concentration of Mind can either be temporal or spatial. In other words, there are discontinua that come from the magical Moment or the magical set of People in Place. When one thinks of historical developments in technology, one sees either the geographically disparate realizations of, say, Edison, Westinghouse, and Tesla or concentrated skunkworks like PARC, where Alan Kay, John Warnock, David Liddle, Bob Metcalfe, et al created personal computing, graphical interfaces, PostScript, Ethernet, and object-oriented software in a brief historical moment.
Great shit happens when it's ready.
We are all somehow engaged in creating the super-saturated solution into which the next crystal of thought dropped will not melt but will commence the formation of bold new crystals. My interest is in identifying, posing, and providing alternative solutions to emerging future problems and issues. Such occurrences have been widely discussed and celebrated in the media. People and organizations who, from the existing technological data base, envision an enabled capability and try, retry, try yet again, etc. Every once in a while something happens that changes the rules of engagement for communication.