Many of these kinds of industrial-history questions can be answered along a few different angles:
* Trade and access to raw materials. This is often one that limits development and diffusion even if the concept is known, and for the bicycle, it's one of the biggest immediate factors. Trade deprivation can often be a factor in historical innovations as the market starts searching for substitutes.
* Education and basic research. The 19th century saw a second "printing revolution" because paper was getting cheaper, enabling the likes of dime novels and penny dreadfuls, but also making literacy a widespread phenomenon, with public schools appearing throughout the industrial world and academia gaining larger libraries and greater capability to specialize on logical-positivist STEM topics, rather than the classical education of nobility and clergy. Less reinvention means more effort towards innovation.
* Market readiness. You can't sell software if nobody has computers; and for manufactured goods the development of an urban lifestyle has to take place. None of the early bicycles do well on unpaved roads. Bicycle adoption trailed automobile adoption, since the latter gave the motivation to pave every street. In the late 19th century, systematic city sanitation policy was still a new innovation and large cities suffered from stinking rivers, open sewerage, and disposal methods that consisted of emptying a bucket out of a window. People were dressing for this reality in heavy suits or dresses and boots, while bicycle usage relies on being less encumbered(and that is still a factor even today).
Today the hype for rental e-scooters can be followed througn a similar series of developments: while scooters as toys have been around for about as long as bicycles, the early 70's saw polyurethane wheels introduced, and this made skating(on boards and in shoes) almost a new sport, since they were inexpensive and could reliably compress and keep rolling without stopping or shattering like clay or metal wheels; scooter wheels are bigger, but also benefited from this change. A few decades passed and Razor introduced the folding kick scooter concept to mass markets, making the scooter as easy to carry as a skateboard. With the last two decades we got better battery power density and smartphone diffusion, making the "dockless" rental scooter commercially viable, along with electric-powered versions of shoes, skateboards, bikes, etc. But there is somewhat of a market readiness issue, since while the potential is obvious, it's hard to use these devices safely on current streets, and there is no established etiquette to their use.