Monday Musings – April 29, 2013

Focus Point For The Week

I have been speaking with a number of people lately about disruption and innovation. The conversations range from shifts in a market to the introduction of a new technology to the impact of new government regulations and programs. I have received a lot of great ideas and insights from the conversations, but the biggest one was that most people tend to use disruption and innovation as synonyms. As much as the tech community and the public sector, two areas I am closest to, would like them to be the same they very definitely are not. Innovation is defined to introduce something new; a new idea, method or device.. Disruption is defined as to break apart; to interrupt the normal course. They are not the same – innovation focuses on the creation aspects, disruption focuses on the deconstruction aspects. When thinking about innovation and disruption, remember that innovation can result in disruption just as a disruption can result in an innovation to compensate for the disruption. But they are not the same.

Monday Morning Perspective

“I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point where they look on every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all.”

– Alexis de Tocqueville