“If you make it, they will come” doesn’t always work. If the technology isn’t ready, they won’t come for sure. But even if you’ve got the tech, then you still have to time it right. The world has to be ready to want it. Customers need to see that your product solves a real problem they have today—not one that they may have in some distant future.

A classic paper by John Gourville, a professor of marketing at Harvard Business School, stipulates that “many innovations fail because consumers irrationally overvalue the old while companies irrationally overvalue the new.”8