Michael Schrage interviewed in Ubiquity:

...you know the line, sort of like "the passionate lunatic overcoming stubborn resistance and then ultimately finding acclaim." That's precisely the exact wrong way to view these things. Number one, you have the statistical problem of survivorship bias, which is, yes, we know the survivors, but what of all the people with supposedly good ideas who perished. Who writes their biographies? The answer is nobody does. So you have an inherently statistically biased sample. But more importantly, the real story of American innovation is the folks who adopted these inventions and thereby transformed them from mere inventions to full-scale innovations? Who are the great customers?