They genuinely believe, at least start, that a wild ass idea is the same thing as an invention.
All they need to do is hire some lackeys to take their genius idea and finish the details.
I had one back in the 1980s who thought he had invented the inertial tracker (after reading about it in a Heinlein book or possibly in Radio Electronics from Don Lancaster).
He tried to hire me to do the "detail" work and was horribly offended when I told him that it was - A unpatentable - B with current technology undoable - C I wanted nothing to do with it or him.
He left screaming about suing me because I was violating our NDA (Looney) and that if I tried to produce such an item he would sue me for theft.
He really believed he had something and I think Holmes really believed she had something too in the beginning.
And if everyone had told her how difficult and unlikely she was to succeed from the beginning instead of petting her and cooing what a brilliant genius she was it would have saved everybody a lot of time money and embarrassment.