In my experience, this usually happens because an exec sees a presentation or comes up with an idea and is like "Let's do this, we'll throw some good people at it and they'll figure out how" and then it turns out that after the org is built, hundreds of people are working on it, and they've investigated all the constraints, it's not actually possible to build the idea. The ideas that actually work usually get developed in the opposite direction, an engineer says "We can build this, let's put an early version in front of some people and see if we should."

Innovation is path-dependent, and communication/adoption/organizational/economic constraints are just as real as technical ones. It's like how pretty much any skilled programmer could've built the first version of Facebook in a weekend, but to take off, it needed to start in the highest social-status campus (Harvard) of the most networked population (college students) of early adopters (young people). That limited the pool of entrepreneurs to basically just Mark Zuckerburg and the Winklevii, and Zuckerburg got there first under somewhat dubious circumstances.

Same with a lot of discussions in politics, climate change, renewable energy, and Hacker News. An uninformed layperson looks at the problem as a whole, says "We should do this, let's throw money at it and someone will figure out how", and then we end up with a financial bubble and not a whole lot of solutions.