More important than the inventor, the first company to market, or even the technology itself, is adoption of the technology. Whether a technology is adopted early or late can make or break not only the technology, inventor, company, or entire industry, but also an entire economy.
“A nation’s ability to adopt new technologies is paramount, affecting everything from the cost of producing capital goods to per capita income,” according to a summary of Diego A. Comin and Bart Hobijn’s Harvard Business School paper “An Exploration of Technology Diffusion.”