There is a huge confusion in this article. It tries to equate distributed innovation ("democratized") with government mandated research into things like stem cells (also "democratized" in the literal sense of mandated by a democratic government).

That doesn't even make any sense, to confuse the two.

I have to agree with another comment about finding generalizations where there are none. Painting with a rather broad brush: all technologies are developed by elite teams top-down or distributed.

What about elite, distributed teams? Yah-know -- like the set of all startups :-P