Here'a post a made on reddit a few years ago about this very problem. I think its pretty relevant here and just about anywhere else that does cutting edge research:
"I want to expand on this because it is a point so often overlooked with all these "holy shit we just created a new tech that is 10000% better" articles. I'm gonna use a loose analogy to try and explain it.
Say you made a perfect cupcake. It is insanely fucking delicious, and will revolutionize the idea of cupcakes. You spent years researching the art of cupcakes, and now have written down the perfect combination of all cupcake factors to make this divine cupcake. Your milk must come from a special dairy who set aside the .02% of the milk that meets your needs, your flour must come from one certain granary using a special indoor grown grain, the eggs from your own 3 specially bred super pampered chickens. The mixing takes place over eight unique specialized mixing procedures, with varying steps in between. The cupcake paper is made from the wood of an endangered Guatemalan tree (requiring federal clearance to obtain 10 sheets of it) and the baking tray from a steel alloy made by one company in Japan, and it's not reusable. The baking process has been tailored to the unique characteristics of your $20,000 1'x1'x1' oven. It takes 3 hours to bake with precise temperature control and positioning adjustment needed throughout the process. The icing also requires it's own set of unique ingredients and precise procedures. To make one of these cupcakes takes 14 hours and costs $2600. If any corners are cut in the process the whole thing falls apart. But done right it is indeed perfect.
A business man finds out about the cupcake that makes people cry tears of joy. He comes to you and needs you to make 35,000 of them a day to sell for $10 each in order to be profitable. Logistically this is simply impossible. No equipment on earth exists that can follow such precise steps for such large quantities, much less a company capable of making it. Your oven costs 20 grand and can bake one cupcake in 3 hours, you need 5000 in 3 hours. Your ingredients come from sources that produce only a minute fraction of what you would need. Never mind that they are scattered around the country making same day delivery impossible short of having your own air fleet. Or that there are only 3 chickens on earth that produce the right eggs. Or that the rare beetle poop in the icing comes from an entomology professor in Peru. Even if you could do all this you still need to adjust the recipe to account for being handled by machines and conveyors. And packaging. And shipping. Oh and slash the cost by a factor of 260.
Since this is all obviously impossible at the time (and for the foreseeable future), you instead just submit the recipe to a food journal and let cooking magazines and TV shows have a field day with sensational articles about the coming cupcake jesus. You become well known and grant money for your legendary lasagna project pours in. There never was any intention to bring this to market, it was just a proof of concept with the added benefit of getting your name out there. It's up to someone else down the road to pick it up and figure out mass production.
If anything people should get more hyped about advancements in production techniques. That's when you will actually get new shit in your hands."
This happened to me in real life. I made a circuit board by hand in the 1980's called the Amiga 14. Basicly if you had the board and a 16 MHz 68000 it double the speed of your Amiga 1000.
I demo it at the World of Commodore in Toronto (I was a member of the Amiga Developer Group that had a booth) the following week I go a call from a gentleman, he wanted to buy 5,000 of them if I made them cheap enough.
But when I designed the circuit I just wanted something to speed up my computer, I never planned a design for mass production. I tried for weeks to change the design for mass production but I could not do it.
Today I know how to get the job done, but back then I did not have the knowledge to mass produce anything I designed.
"Let's say you found the recipe for the perfect cupcake, but you need an egg so perfect that only one per day is laid in the whole world. No matter how much demand there is, you can't scale up production, since you depend on that single egg."
"I want to expand on this because it is a point so often overlooked with all these "holy shit we just created a new tech that is 10000% better" articles. I'm gonna use a loose analogy to try and explain it.
Say you made a perfect cupcake. It is insanely fucking delicious, and will revolutionize the idea of cupcakes. You spent years researching the art of cupcakes, and now have written down the perfect combination of all cupcake factors to make this divine cupcake. Your milk must come from a special dairy who set aside the .02% of the milk that meets your needs, your flour must come from one certain granary using a special indoor grown grain, the eggs from your own 3 specially bred super pampered chickens. The mixing takes place over eight unique specialized mixing procedures, with varying steps in between. The cupcake paper is made from the wood of an endangered Guatemalan tree (requiring federal clearance to obtain 10 sheets of it) and the baking tray from a steel alloy made by one company in Japan, and it's not reusable. The baking process has been tailored to the unique characteristics of your $20,000 1'x1'x1' oven. It takes 3 hours to bake with precise temperature control and positioning adjustment needed throughout the process. The icing also requires it's own set of unique ingredients and precise procedures. To make one of these cupcakes takes 14 hours and costs $2600. If any corners are cut in the process the whole thing falls apart. But done right it is indeed perfect.
A business man finds out about the cupcake that makes people cry tears of joy. He comes to you and needs you to make 35,000 of them a day to sell for $10 each in order to be profitable. Logistically this is simply impossible. No equipment on earth exists that can follow such precise steps for such large quantities, much less a company capable of making it. Your oven costs 20 grand and can bake one cupcake in 3 hours, you need 5000 in 3 hours. Your ingredients come from sources that produce only a minute fraction of what you would need. Never mind that they are scattered around the country making same day delivery impossible short of having your own air fleet. Or that there are only 3 chickens on earth that produce the right eggs. Or that the rare beetle poop in the icing comes from an entomology professor in Peru. Even if you could do all this you still need to adjust the recipe to account for being handled by machines and conveyors. And packaging. And shipping. Oh and slash the cost by a factor of 260.
Since this is all obviously impossible at the time (and for the foreseeable future), you instead just submit the recipe to a food journal and let cooking magazines and TV shows have a field day with sensational articles about the coming cupcake jesus. You become well known and grant money for your legendary lasagna project pours in. There never was any intention to bring this to market, it was just a proof of concept with the added benefit of getting your name out there. It's up to someone else down the road to pick it up and figure out mass production.
If anything people should get more hyped about advancements in production techniques. That's when you will actually get new shit in your hands."