Amir, I work at the sponsoring company so I've been exposed to a lot of the contestants @ the regional level. A few comments:
1) Most of these top tier kids @ the international level are really geniuses. We're talking way beyond perfect GPAs & SAT scores. In other words, they have the brain power to make a breakthrough with proper direction.
2) Select high schools with science fair magnet programs work in conjunction with local colleges & research labs. Ideas like the ones you list above often come from frequent interaction with experts in the field (at other science fairs, as a guest speaker @ the science magnet program, etc.). As you said, high schools do not have the facilities for some of these projects. Any papers, patents, and IP are typically owned by the sponsoring college/lab (student gets primary author kudos).
3) The dynamic should be viewed more as a professor / PhD candidate. The PhD candidiate typically has not pulled his/her idea out of thin air... they often build upon existing work in the professor's field. A similar style of interaction is used on these science fair projects. It often takes months for the student to come up with the actual experiment; it's not the prof saying "hey, why don't you do these measurements for me". If you talk to these kids, it is clear that they did most of the work.
4) Often a successful (i.e. award winning) project is the students 2nd or 3rd project that they did @ that lab or the result of multiple years of research. They don't get to waltz into a lab and start playing with a $$$ piece of hardware.
. I have seen too many parents who do the homework for the kid rather than having them lead. So thought there may be some possibility of that here.
