Ideas are worth exactly as much as you can sell them for.
> If I have a breakthrough while researching, I'm screwed unless I also manage to form a company with a production line?
You would be exactly right if you removed "screwed" because it implies that you're entitled to be rewarded for your ideas and not being paid for ideas alone is unfair to you.
You're not entitled to that.
You're not even entitled to be rewarded for actual, hard work (e.g. if you work for a year on software product that fails to sell, you worked hard but that alone doesn't mean someone will give you money because of that).
The problem with patents is that they grant 20 year monopoly on patented ideas and people finally realized that there are very lucrative ways to abuse that monopoly for financial gain, without actually creating any value i.e. if you patent an idea for making an ice cream and don't actually make an ice cream, you can still extract value by suing people who actually do make ice cream, even if they came up with the idea independently, as it usually happens, given that in U.S. alone there are 300 millions of mostly college educated people i.e. a lot of people to come up with ideas.
Ideas are worth exactly as much as you can sell them for.
> If I have a breakthrough while researching, I'm screwed unless I also manage to form a company with a production line?
You would be exactly right if you removed "screwed" because it implies that you're entitled to be rewarded for your ideas and not being paid for ideas alone is unfair to you.
You're not entitled to that.
You're not even entitled to be rewarded for actual, hard work (e.g. if you work for a year on software product that fails to sell, you worked hard but that alone doesn't mean someone will give you money because of that).
The problem with patents is that they grant 20 year monopoly on patented ideas and people finally realized that there are very lucrative ways to abuse that monopoly for financial gain, without actually creating any value i.e. if you patent an idea for making an ice cream and don't actually make an ice cream, you can still extract value by suing people who actually do make ice cream, even if they came up with the idea independently, as it usually happens, given that in U.S. alone there are 300 millions of mostly college educated people i.e. a lot of people to come up with ideas.