We are dealing with the aftermath of this in my company right now. Our former CTO, though a brilliant researcher, was absolutely not in touch with the needs of our clients. He treated the business as an extension of his previous R&D work and rather than focusing on commercializing the research and with a focus on customer requirements...which can be boring, like interfacing with large legacy data sources, he focused on the next cool and unproven researchy thing.

He's been gone for 6 months and we are still digging ourselves out of the crater he tossed us into.

Amazingly, the next release of our software post-CTO, which, now that the reigns were off, was designed to address very outstanding customer requirements, resulted in our first break-even quarter and our first cash flow positive month in the company's history. But we should have been at that point a year and a half ago.

Lesson to self: sometimes viability comes not from a cool idea, but from how that idea is packaged.