[starfallg]

You are conflating innovation with disruption.

Space rockets - done before by the state. Commercialising it is disruption.

Electric cars - done before and lost in the market due to battery tech (lithium tech research has been funded also publicaly)

AWS - co-opting open source software and turning it into a service isn't exactly innovation. But scaling it up to such a degrees is market disruption.

You don't need huge amount of capital to be innovative, people naturally are. But you need a system to roll-out innovations and when you do this at scale, it becomes disruptive. VC and tech giant funding brings this forward but societal change is mainly driven by technology, not by capital.