hebig.org/blog
personal webnode of Haiko Hebig

Typically, those who first work on an idea or concept will see that it has a very wide scope of application, however, they are almost always forced to focus on one or another specific, limited scopes in order to present their idea in a relevant fashion to potential adopters who have specific issues addressed by the innovation. Often, in the process of this focused positioning to convince early-adopters to accept an idea or process, much of the full richness of the vision is lost or put aside. The cost of acceptance is thus often the loss of very important, even essential, elements of the vision. Sometimes, the loss is permanent and only the original thinker knows what paths were not traveled...

That is a very good summary of what everyone in engineering who envisions, develops and builds stuffs that is actually new is likely to experience.

I learned this when I helped developing a new manufacturing process in the domain of rapid prototyping and solid freeform fabrication. In the end we came up with a process, a set of materials and a machine that was well positionable in the market, but of course, it was different from our initial vision. It was the initial vision after the real world with its multitude of constraints has acted upon it (1)

(Still it is important for the future development of the product and the company not to forget the initial vision. This is a good case for solid, narrative documentation of what has been done, what worked and - even more important - what did not work and why. We had to abandon many interesting paths because they were blocked by technological and other limitations - at the given time. But such work needs not to be lost: writing down what was aimed at, was the encountered limitations looked like and under what conditions it could work anyway is the key. Then, things can be re-assessed at a later time under the light of technological advancement, and promising paths blocked in the past could turn out to be open now. A wiki looks like the tool of choice here, but the tricky part of course is to get people actually writing things down.)

Bob Wyman, the author of above piece, of course has much better and more exciting examples than I could give: his attempts to get Hypertext built at DEC during the 80's, and the current re-discovery of the word "write" in the initial vision of the Internet as a read/write-place:

How the read/write web was lost... →

[via Danny Ayers]

(1) Addition 2005-12-29: This is by far not as negative as it may sound.