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Some companies specialize in making or servicing tools, and some even specialize in redesigning and inventing tools. All these tool companies use tools themselves. Let us say that tool type A "aids" tool type B if tools of type A are used when improving tools of type B. The aiding graph can have cycles, such as when A aids B aids C aids D aids A.
Such tool aid cycles contribute to progress and growth. Sometimes a set of tool types will stumble into conditions especially favorable for mutual improvement. When the aiding cycles are short and the aiding relations are strong, a set of tools may improve together especially quickly. Such favorable storms of mutual improvement usually run out quickly, however, and in all of human history no more than three storms have had a large and sustained enough impact to substantially change world economic growth rates.
Imagine you are a venture capitalist reviewing a proposed business plan. UberTool Corp has identified a candidate set of mutually aiding tools, and plans to spend a millions pushing those tools through a mutual improvement storm. While UberTool may sell some minor patents along the way, UberTool will keep its main improvements to itself and focus on developing tools that improve the productivity of its team of tool developers.
In fact, UberTool thinks that its tool set is so fantastically capable of mutual improvement, and that improved versions of its tools would be so fantastically valuable and broadly applicable, UberTool does not plan to stop their closed self-improvement process until they are in a position to suddenly burst out and basically "take over the world." That is, at that point their costs would be so low they could enter and dominate most industries.
Now given such enormous potential gains, even a very tiny probability that UberTool could do what they planned might enticed you to invest in them. But even so, just what exactly would it take to convince you UberTool had even such a tiny chance of achieving such incredible gains?
Fund UberTool?
To expect a business-like proposition out of ÜberTool in order to put your money there is, sincerely, to completely miss the point of the questioning. I think the only one remotely grasping what we are discussing here is the guy who said "if this works out you'll have to redefine shareholder" :-)
He is right, if this works out maybe putting your money there would be a bad idea IF THE PROJECT worked, for it would be so dramatic a change that maybe being distant from it was more palatable. But this is also not the question, the question is "What could make you believe it to work?" My own opinion follows.
First, i would require the enterprise to NOT frame it's aims in recognizable terms. That means, i would not believe anyone proposing to make a "new computer" or a "new telescope" or even a "new industry" or to shorten any NEW anything. Any advancement that really did merit the "über" in the title would be so new that it would be ridiculous to explain it in terms of previous data.
Also, i guess i would expect them to have huge communication problems. Anyone who had a reasonable plan to get there would be so hopelessly beyond current trends as to make it difficult to understand, so to say. (This is actually a side-effect from my first proposition).
I would require the plan to incorporate present, common-sense, familiar, reliable ideas in unfamiliar and unreliable and unpredictable ways. That is to say, i would expect the plan to begin with present techniques, without dependence upon big-tech or big-science, so that the elements could be expected to mix and match in creative ways without big costs at each interaction.
Finally, i think the general realm where the advancements would be expected to apply must be very mundane and "day-to-day", that is, i would expect the proposed "final stage" to be spoken of not in terms of some magical-sounding arcane "super-power", but instead in terms of modifications in the experience of concrete human beings. I think the enterprise would have to be aiming not at "being the next technological wave", but in "changing our very way of life", if you can see the difference.
But obviously, the very issue of "why don't we simply do that" is noise in the chain. The meta-advancement does not happen just because it is difficult to get rid of the small stupid problems. It is difficult to diminish the inertia. If they could tell me how they expect to do that, i would not only be already putting my money there, i would be applying for a job!
Nothing. Literally. History is littered with examples of better mousetraps that were never widely adopted because the worse mousetrap made it to consumers that much sooner. Think of the Dvorak keyboard.