[MichaelGG]

Are you sure? Has there been a study done on inventions/patents to know how many are that useful? For instance, if I come up with a, I dunno, a coffee filter that's 2% more effective, sure I've invented something. But I might not make any money ever because a 2% efficiency increase is irrelevant for non-industrial-scale things, generally. (Or maybe that 2% gain costs 5% more.) So maybe a lot of people are just inventing "stuff" that while technically an invention, isn't really that useful, business acumen or not.