wastoids

This question really bugs me, and am curious if anyone has any first hand experience seeing innovation 'happen' in a company. How do companies actually innovate? Especially when everyone is working on projects all the time?

For example, you may have seen this before, of 2 cavemen hauling a heavy load with a wheelbarrow with square wheels, with another showing them round wheels - "sorry, we're too busy" they exclaim and off they go: https://www.creativityatwork.com/wp-content/uploads/wheel.png.webp

You see most of my working life (programmer) all I've been is busy; working on projects non-stop as thats what I'm being paid to do - work. I've never once had time to innovate except maybe something minor on the fly. The project managers don't exactly innovate, as they're not tech focused so no one really innovates.

But then I see companies whom are obviously innovating all the time, ie chip companies: the process of 10mm to 7mm to 5mm is mind blowing to say the least, but theres no way they came up with the process on the fly? Did they? They must have had time to think, for a long time.

So how do they do it, are there specialised employees who are paid to sit around and 'ponder'? Are there employees being paid to do nothing but experiment with not a guarantee of ever solving any problem? How do companies actually innovate?

Do you think there are still opportunities in tech (websites, mobile apps) for blazing new trails - for example Zuckerberg inventing facebook in his dorm room etc. Or have we passed that exciting infancy period forever, and everything that has been invented has been invented? If not, what's a field in tech still unexplored that a individual could still find some gold in?

Feeling very uninspired as of late so I thought I'd get the conversation started as I think we all need some 'hope' to keep going

Is time getting quicker but I feel like it was just the other day everyone could not stop talking about the 'newest' emerging technologies we MUST all jump in on. IOT and Big Data.

Just curious what every came from the hype, or did we all just realise we didn't want out garbage cans communicating with our refrigerators and companies realised maybe there is such thing as too much information?

Was it all just replaced with the ever more important blockchain hype..