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.
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.