What drives us towards innovation?

Question from the Internet:

“What type of incentive leads to better innovation: profit, necessity, or other reasons?”

Our basic matter, our driving force, our engine is an insatiable desire to receive pleasures for ourselves. All our calculations are based on an egocentric, subjective “pleasure/pain” software, taking us closer to ever-increasing selfish pleasures while distancing ourselves from real or expected pain suffering.

In what external forms this inner engine dresses into — profit, necessity, survival, competition, wealth, or control over others — changes all the time.

The problem is that by blindly following this inherent driving force we have become like cancer in the globally integrated and interdependent world we evolved into as a result of Nature’s relentless drive towards most optimal integration all across its system.

Thus our problem-solving ability and collective survival in this fully integrated, interdependent system depend on redirecting, re-educating our inner engine, upgrading our original software. This can happen by a conscious, tangible understanding feeling that in this integrated and interdependent world my personal profit, success, and survival intricately interconnects, depends on the profit, success, and survival of the whole integrated system.