Examples where you make something people want, but are unable to profit?
philwelch: Any non-excludable goods, which includes public goods (which are also non-rivalrous) are very difficult to profit from. These include lighthouses, laws, national defense, clean air and water, a sustainable population of fish and game, and so forth.I say "very difficult" because search engines, for example, are non-rivalrous and non-excludable in practice. They are "public goods". The trick is, access to the attentions of and data generated by search engine users is excludable, and this is the good that Google actually sells. But any sort of non-excludable good from which your consumers cannot generate an excludable good you can sell for others would be unprofitable.Programming languages (mentioned by another post) are another good example of a public good: they are non-rivalrous, and while they may be excludable as long as you sell the only compiler/interpreter/runtime and sue everyone else who writes a different compiler/interpreter/runtime, in practice no one will pay for a programming language anymore so you have to make it non-excludable for it to even exist in the outside world. Likewise, Google is probably excludable in the sense that they can set up a paywall before you use it, but in practice Google has chosen to make the search engine non-excludable and it's hard to see how a paywalled search engine would work (though I won't rule it out as a possibility).