Professor Robert Shiller on finance as an innovation domain:

... the history of finance is the history of invention just as much as it is in other fields, notably engineering. The idea that I want to develop is that the history of finance is a history of discrete inventions. Non-obvious ideas were conceived of to solve these problems of long-term risks and to get around the psychological barriers imposed by framing biases and psychological biases, in order to allow people to actually manage the risk and to get around moral hazard. It's a difficult thing to do these things and that's why we need invention.

From an invention/innovation perspective, the whole lecture is interesting throughout because it shows how it takes years, if not centuries, to solve problems that have "obvious" solutions.