Do we - as taxpayers - concentrate on seeding thousands of startups, and wait for our salvation to sprout in the form of a few wildly innovative winners? Or do we focus on improving our infrastructure by helping existing companies make their operations and supply chains more reliable and energy efficient? Otherwise said, do we trust entrepreneurs or system builders to help us make the step from a relatively simple, disconnected world to a very complex, highly connected one?

The challenges we face are so fundamentally global and systemic that we should hand the reins to the systems builders from the get go. Entrepreneurs will surely play an important role, but we can’t count on their flashes of individual brilliance alone to upgrade our physical and technical infrastructures. Just look what they did to our financial one.

http://blog.vanno.com/index.php/2008/11/23/tesla-gm-and-a-national-cto/