I appreciate your positive view on the topic. This is right in many ways. On the other hand I think innovation is very made up nowadays. So to really innovate you will probably need your elite network, funding, connections ... much more than knowing how to manage sub optimal conditions.
That's true, but I'm not sure if this is really a new thing, or if it's always been the case.
I do think that if you want to be the proverbial "guy in the garage inventing the future," it's probably better to be a liberal arts school dropout / kicked out of a state university (Jobs + Wozniak) than coming from Harvard (Gates.) But for such people, there may be zero correlation between real innovation and financial reward.
