One hurdle I see is Innovation where? The answer to the question is not that easy.

People working alone can't revelutionise the world in the current scenario.

Kaustubh Katdare

All the innovation that seems to be happening across various engineering disciplines; more so in electronics & computing domain seems to be incremental feature upgrades; and nothing 'breakthrough' sorts. We do cover a few news about real innovation through VoiCE; but nothing that comes closer to invention of TV or say Radio or say mobile phones. Adding a biometric sensor to an existing phone may not be called as 'breakthrough innovation'. I hope you got the point.

Do you think we're focused more on improving existing things than inventing something that'll change lives of people for the next 100 years?

Probably we're so blinded by innovation that we fail to see the 'situ' things that matter over to 'wanting-something-totally-new'. Consumption of energy has reduced (fairly and still is under development) thanks to these 'feature-upgraded-innovativeness' that we now have products which tend to be more 'eco-friendly' than spoil our environment. Thanks to all the 'innovation and craziness' of science over the past few years, we've created enough damage to this Earth to probably even reduce it's 'life-span'. Now, when people (scientists/engineers/who-ever-it-may-be) are trying to 'break-through' the 'cult' of 'planet destruction' and embrace 'planet-preservation-upto-an-extend', why shouldn't we find 'innovative-ness' in it?

P.S.: Better to focus on turning the present technology into eco-friendly technology than to focus on creating new-ones that could (possibly) add harm to earth.