The market can work, but I think we've been going through a particular centuries-long period where the capital-intensive projects are most celebrated since they bring together the best of industrialization. However, there are crowdfunding platforms of various kinds now that let you sustainably finance small projects or build a marketing story that can be taken to a larger investor. When you get some proof, the funding spigot can flood in rather suddenly.
I agree that open-ended research still isn't very rewarded since it goes too far from immediate wants. But I also suspect we are going to get a quality bump on "small stuff" in the coming decades, because so many of our technologies were rushed to market as soon as they were mature enough, and that was a causal factor in major quality issues like buggy/insecure software. Those issues are not cap-intensive to fix, and could subsist on crowdfunding solutions, but they need awareness.
I agree that open-ended research still isn't very rewarded since it goes too far from immediate wants. But I also suspect we are going to get a quality bump on "small stuff" in the coming decades, because so many of our technologies were rushed to market as soon as they were mature enough, and that was a causal factor in major quality issues like buggy/insecure software. Those issues are not cap-intensive to fix, and could subsist on crowdfunding solutions, but they need awareness.