Creators need infrastructure and I don’t mean just running water and electricity, I mean resources to create (synthesize) with. For me that means network devices, the output of the IEEE and IETF and W3C, the entire ecosystem of network users, and the economic market of e-commerce among other things. I’m not going to be very effective if I have to start off by designing a networking standard from scratch, then build a network device from scratch, then write the software to operate the device, then convince people to connect their computers to it, etc., etc., etc.
Super willful or super talented people can sometimes work an idea to fruition, but being super rich is usually requisite as well. Wired has a great article on how James Cameron started on the path to Avatar after seeing Star Wars in 1977. Will and talent only got him so far, however, and if he didn’t have the paycheck from Titanic to liberate him from the system and give him the free time and the authority to push everyone in the film industry towards the 3D camera and projector, computer graphics, and sound technology he needed, Avatar would still be a dream. He literally had to imagine and build the infrastructure required to finish the project.
For those of us not on track to collect a few hundred million dollars for one project to build our own infrastructure, infrastructure is still provided by external sources.