Then you've been at different small companies than I have. Obviously if you're the only person in tech at that company it's hard to do groundbreaking stuff. But small tech companies solve challenges everyday. And being able to directly convince the CEO (who is often technical at these companies) can make decisions much quicker than at large companies.
> small tech companies solve challenges everyday
Yes, just not challenges that requires ideas to solve. They are mostly just following the same path every other tech company went, re implementing the same systems. To them it doesn't matter if the system is better or worse, they just want a system since going from 0 to 1 is huge, meaning that they wont give you time or resources to implement your idea, they just want a cheap idea.
Not really, if I come up with a novel algorithm or a different architecture to do a task better at Google then they will give me the chance to implement it even if it takes months or years. Small companies doesn't care about your ideas, they just want a cog that can give them a basic website because that is all they need, novel things doesn't help them.
If you mean "novel product ideas" then sure, but we aren't product managers we are programmers so our ideas would mostly be related to architecture or algorithms.