It's true that innovation process used to take a long time. See the story of the telegraph for example, which was clearly a breakthrough, but took half a century to be adopted (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Victorian_Internet).
They were sending images by telegraph in the 1860s but it didn't catch on. Admittedly the ye olde faxes had to be specially prepared, it couldn't reproduce a printed image directly. But still, amazing how long it took images to routinely travel electronically.
What I don't understand about the telegraph, is why it never evolved further. Surely a primitive machine could tap out morse code (or something like it), and decode it, much faster than a human operator? And surely there was demand for this, given the very high costs of sending telegraphs. So high they were inaccessible to the average person.
And then once you have a machine that can do this, well you can start to consider routing, and telegraphing straight into homes, and having telegraph services that store information that can be access remotely...
It took until the telephone to reach the average person's home. And telephones are much more sophisticated than just sending blips over a wire. They had much higher bandwidth. And there was much greater complexity involved in wiring up everyone's house, then a crude automated routing telegraph machine would require, I think.
It did evolve quite a bit. There were machines to automatically encode/decode messages. You could even plug a keyboard to it. Some people (Morse himself) had such a device at home.
Routing was a thing, but there were some limitations of how many communications could happen at the same time on the same wire (Baud was the one who actually worked on that), making scaling difficult.
The important thing to understand is at the end of the century, as bandwidth, infrastructure scaling, reliability were all getting better, the phone happened, as a logical next step. The telegraph never made is as a personal device because the infrastructure and the science of the telegraph reached a point where phones were possible.
Morse for original mechanism, Baud for scaling, Bell to use voice instead of beeps.
Nowadays, the process might take a lot lot less time than before though (http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolu...)
And also - let's remember that it's not because something goes through the first steps of this seven-step path that it will become a breakthrough.