Having worked at a think tank, think tanks don't get paid for their ideas. At least not in the way we're discussing them. They get paid for doing research and folding this reseach into policy.

Let me put it another way. The recommendations that a think tank comes up with isn't worth the paper it's printed on without the weeks/months of backup research that shows how the recommendations came about. That's what is being paid for, not the idea/recommendation.

But that's what we're talking about here, I believe. As with anything, there are both good and bad ideas. Think tanks are paid to come up with good ideas; since ideas are a market for lemons (asymmetric information about their worth), the thinktank then signals that the ideas are good by providing accompanying research. The thinktank could just tell you their ideas and keep the research to themselves, but you probably wouldn't believe them.

Now, since 90% of the output of all cretative processes is crap, and that includes ideas; and since ideas experience network effects where the best ideas will gain supporters who will exponentially increase the "execution" multiplier for the idea, while the long tail of ideas will never get executed on at all; it becomes pretty obvious that the median idea won't have any market value whatsoever. Talking about "ideas" as if they all had the same worth will then lead you to believe that, since the median idea isn't worth much, no idea can be.

But the think tanks don't get paid for their ideas. And frankly think tanks are a bad example, since they really generate original ideas per se. But usually offer recommendations that are within the realm of what is commonly known in the field, but what's not clear is what is the best solution, e.g., what's the best way to do spectrum auctions.

So in these examples there's usually a handful of ways to handle it. Think tanks will often build models, go through the literature, and recommend a way of doing it. The value isn't in just the recommendation. You can find five other think tanks that will point to five other ways of doing it. The value is in their research.

To bring it back to HN. Here's an idea I have. Wouldn't it be cool to be able to teleport from point A to point B? How much do you want to pay me for the idea? Probably not much. But what if I had done a whole bunch of research in physics that gave a foundation for how it could be done, and built a device that could teleport a particle from A to a random location (so not location B). All of sudden the "idea" looks like it might be worth something. But you're really not buying the idea. You're buying all of the work that comes after the idea. It's not a bad idea, but it's not worth much without a whole lot of work.