What do you mean? Space Data was using them, they built a bunch of balloon networks for the military. It's not clear to me that their allegations are correct, but they can hardly be accused of being an NPE.

For civilian purposes that's basically equivalent to being a NPE.

In reality it's even worse, since NPEs typically don't (indirectly) cause physical harm to people.

what about ideas that take a long time to implement? what about non-large entities who patent an idea and take a long time to implement due to resource constraints? there should be some incentive to producing novel ideas... what novel means is the hard part to define.