I feel like this is science research in general - it's a battle for money, and only a few groups really manage great research vs. doing the whole grant application shuffle.

What do you think about the few groups actually doing electrode design (i.e. there was a UC Berkeley/Lawrence Livermore group looking at electrode designs)?

Vs. I think most of the innovations in BCI engineering happen to be in the commercial sector (i.e. deep brain stimulation electrodes from Boston Sci, Medtronic, Abbott, the arrays from Black Rock in Utah, Neuralynx, etc).