Most of the great innovations emerged from the private sector and made the innovators very very rich. Would James Watt have invented the steam engine if he was living just a couple of centuries before his time, or was there something specific about the environment of his day that facilitated him to do so? Maybe in a hypothetical society that provided no monetary benefits to people for innovating, Watt still would have created his steam engine. Certainly there are cases in history where people did great things for the world without a profit incentive (Jonas Salk creating the polio vaccine comes to mind), but you have to admit that the incentives help.