Work in progress - just notes at this point
From the perspective of the wider community, even country, the basic issue is proper compensation, rather incentive, for the individual to work hard to come up with new stuff. An individual who takes time to bring an idea to the market must give something up and the process of working out ideas, removing the kinks is quite laborious. So it should come as no surprise that many would want to hang onto and enjoy the fruits of their labors. What if there were a way for the broader community to compensate them for their ideas
I see no reason why a group of people, feeling inspired, can't join forces and come up with some ideas and hold onto them, to help artificially inflate their wages and contracts. They used to call these guild, IIRC. Keeping knowledge secret is more difficult now a days, so guilds don't really work as well for the protection of ideas and techniques.
Where do ideas truly originate, is one question.
If atheist, one can claim they originate from ... well ... nowhere or some cosmic fluctuation I suppose, if more of a theist, or even deist, then one might say that ideas seem to pop into a cross-section of humanity at almost the same time. One could argue that the ideas that spontaneously emerge in our heads were nothing we labored to create, rather they just popped in there. But, an idea is one thing, and everyone has lots of good ideas that never come to fruition. There are those who labor to bring their ideas to the rest of us, and they need some incentive to make it worth their while - to quit their day job, etc.
But then, -- I'm sure people are aware of the story of Alexander Graham Bell arriving at the patent office only a short while before his predecessor. Both presumably invested quite a bit of labor in taking an idea beyond just an idea, into the research, experimentation, and so forth.
While it may no the perfect, in this country we use the patent system to give such ideas incentive to make it to production. Some have used the patent system to stifle innovation, but overall, it seems to work out ok.
What possible improvements could there be on this system?