Historians of technology have long noted that inventions are not ideas so much as they are systems. Which is to say, they are not one person saying, "hey, wouldn't it be neat if we could fly in a helicopter?" Ideas are cheap. Instead, they are what we sometimes pretentiously call assemblages: the intersection of ideas (often many of them), social circumstances, resources, and institutions of one sort or another. Even reasonably "simple" technologies like the bow and arrow require these kinds of things: you need to have people who can make the bows and arrows, and train others how to use them, and, more importantly, have a good reason to do that and not something else (if you can more easily get food with a fishing rod and not a bow and arrow, then why use the bow and arrow?).

Separately, we might also suggest that having an idea and realizing it are two different things. Lots of people came up with ideas for airplanes prior to the Wright Brothers. But making them work was quite difficult. Could Taqi al-Din have come up with a working steam engine? Maybe. But it's not as easy as just deciding to make it. Lots of people had the idea of making one, and made prototypes, etc. Thomas Newcomen's success was not that he was smarter than any of those; he ended up being persistent, in part because there was a huge, obvious financial goal at the time (pumping water out of coal mines). He didn't come up with the idea from scratch, either; he was building off of other work — his successful "atmospheric engine" was the culmination of maybe 50 years of people trying to solve this single problem. Even then, if it hadn't been harnessed to the economic needs, would it have taken off? Who knows, but probably not. As it was, the initial economic benefit of pumping water out of mines provided enough impetus for further development, which eventually led to many other uses down the line (and improvements that allowed the engines to be made much smaller).

When historians of technology study something like this today, they might start by looking at the invention or the inventor, but they very quickly try to reconstruct the world that brought these things about. And they pay attention to things that seem perhaps mundane or peripheral, but are absolutely essential for the invention taking off. As just another example: Thomas Edison's success with the light bulb was not the filament he chose. That was, of course, a necessary precondition. But his real success was building up an electrical infrastructure and convincing people to pay for it — electric light was the "killer app" to sell electrification, and the work of building up an electrical grid is considerably harder, and more ambitious, than finding an ideal filament for a bulb.

None of this is meant to diminish the need for a clever person at some stage. But clever people have always existed, in every society; it is a necessary but not sufficient explanation for why some things get built and others don't. The American model of technology puts a lot of emphasis on the importance of the inventor (often the "lone inventor," laboring in isolation), but this is a largely mythical construction meant to romanticize technology, not a good model for how it actually works.

If you are interested in the history of invention and technology, there are many excellent books and authors out there. A great starting point is Thomas Parke Hughes, who did considerable work on the emergence of large technological systems.