On the contrary, it's quite possible for practical implementation details to hold back a field for hundreds of years. My favorite example is the hydrogen fuel cell. It was invented at a time when Abraham Lincoln was busy launching his first political career and still looked like this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln#mediaviewer/Fil...

yet 180 years later hydrogen fuel cells still aren't a competitive energy storage strategy. Less spectacular examples include flying cars and speech recognition / AI.