"Innovation isn't a matter of left or right"

I left my Public Finance class today thinking about how good management transcends political boundaries. Examining data and deducing an innovative solution that maximizes benefits and minimizes externalities presumably will lead to workable solutions regardless of party registration. After I thought this, I then thought to myself, "Self, government by experts didn't work particularly well in the former U.S.S.R." The sheer amount of data available about any particular issue is too much for one expert or even a team of experts to handle. The premise of democracy is that "none of us is as dumb as all of us," and when it comes to innovation in policy and technology, the Internet making this statement truer than ever. Decentralized efforts to solve intractable problems gave us the Internet itself and the decoded genome. And now collective wisdom is helping new social ventures to get off the ground through Kickstarter and Kiva. Other crowdsourcing efforts like Ushahidi and Rhiza Labs FracTracker are working to channel our collective consciousness directly into scalable solutions. As the New York Times wrote today, these solutions don't come from the left or the right. They come from the collective center. My question to you is: Do ideological mindsets promote, or stifle innovation? And why is it that a ton of people who know just a little continually come up with better solutions than a few people who know a lot?