What If Thomas Edison had been depended on funding from the chiefs of the Candle Industry

How many unfunded Edisons and un-invented light bulbs are there today?

When the developers of the state of the art are deciding who to fund to develop tomorrow's art, the funding goes narrow, and misses leap-frogging technology of the future. The solution: bring to the fore imaginative people who are not vested in today's technology. This can be done formally. When assembling a funding committee to bring in someone who is not an expert, is not deeply involved in the funded field, and give them weight.

A daring solution would be to make a list of funding proposals that pass a very basic threshold test, and then allocate available funds randomly among these proposals.

For big projects I would propose to hire imaginative fiction writers and pay them to write a plot of the future based on the prospective validity of a given 'crazy' proposal. When such fictional story is read by the funding committee, a better feel for the new idea is generated.

Uninvented technologies, like aborted babies, don't scream: look what you have missed! So it is very normal to ignore a call like in this post. As probably you will do too.