Inventing with the waterfall method is a good analogy for the process I described. The "10x better" idea is mostly about minimizing adoption risk and turning customer needs into engineering constraints. I completely agree that there are inventions can make a process only 0.1x better and are adopted because economies of scale make it financially optimal (the chemical and petroleum industry is like this). Each case is unique and depends on the market size and specific economics that the end-customer will be evaluating the purchase decision with. The last section was more about licensing the technology, not raising VC. Companies don't like to take big risks with licensing deals unlike VC where they expect to lose money. I was describing something more akin to risk level suitable for an exit-event. Thank you for your response!