I posted this in r/socialism as well, but it seems that they lean heavily towards state socialism and state-planned economies, and I'm more interested in the libertarian socialist response.

For context, I'm a biochemist and bioinformatics scientist who works in the biotech R&D space, so innovation is something I'm very passionate about.

One of the most common criticisms of socialism in general is that it doesn't stimulate innovation to the same extent that capitalism does.

Right now, the primary method of startup innovation, at least in biotech, goes something like this:

1. Inventor/scientist has a brilliant idea
2. Tests idea in preliminary experiments, finds promising results
3. Identifies a market where the idea solves a meaningful real-world problem
4. Pitches idea to a venture capital firm
5. Receives seed funding to develop idea into intellectual property
6. Performs larger scale tests to validate the invention
7. Scale up and bring to market, usually with a big corporate partner if the invention is a drug or medical device, since clinical trials are costly

In libertarian socialism, who does the scientist pitch the idea to? What is the incentive structure to develop the idea into something that meaningfully improves the world and rewards the scientist for their invention?

I'm a libertarian socialist at heart, trying to reconcile my left-wing values with the need for scalable scientific breakthroughs that meaningfully help people in novel and transformative ways.