I didn't invent IoT. But in 2001 I independently proposed building something we'd now immediately recognise as IoT, and my lecturer dismissed it as simplistic and pointless for my dissertation..
Academia is only as good as the people in it.
I ended up doing traffic shaping in the Linux kernel because my house mate had edonkey running all day..
Ha! In 97 on I proposed a web page that would read content from a database (for multilingual support). My supervisor demanded I decide if I was building a web page or a database because I couldn’t do both!