That cannot be discounted: similar to electric cards, the need for robust demand to drive innovation is essential.

I am suspicious about this. This is because, at school, I once attended a talk by a pharmaceutical production line manager, at which he quite explicitly said that they deliberately hold back the rate of innovation, in terms of making the production line more efficient - if they have more ideas than they need to meet their targets, they put those ideas on hold or apply them only partially, or less efficiently, in order to try and meet their profit targets for both this quarter and next quarter. I questioned him on this, because I was amazed, and he was quite insistent about it - "this is how business works". Now, that may be specific to the pharmaceutical industry, but I don't think so.

In a nutshell, I believe the desire to maximise profits distorts innovation, and not just in the way I've just outlined above, in other ways as well. But of course this raises much deeper questions: capitalism vs nationalisation, etc.