Children love to play with new toys, but hate disruption to their established routines.  These characteristics persist in adult life.  Innovation is readily adopted when it  is incorporated in new gadgets, but  innovation which involves doing things differently is resisted. 

          Look round a university.  At a superficial level, modern information technology has changed everything.  Most activities – communication, scheduling, presentations – are conducted electronically.  At a deeper level, nothing at all has changed.  The course structures and materials and  the methods of pedagogy remain essentially the same.      

        As the economist of innovation Richard Nelson has pointed out, American children are much healthier than they once were, but not much better at learning to read.  Innovation that comes in a pill or injection is easily adopted:  innovation that manages a process better is not.  We demand the latest medical treatments, but resist attempts to persuade us to adopt a healthier lifestyle.

It has always been so. Anaesthesia was discovered in the mid 19^th century, and soon all surgeons were using it.  But when a Viennese physician discovered that the most important thing surgeons could do to keep their patients alive – especially those patients who were  new born infants – was to wash their hands, the profession resisted the innovation for half a century. Doctors would readily experiment with new chemicals, but fought any acknowledgement  that their procedures were defective.

         Authors and publishers have bought e-book readers and embraced computerised technology:  but when I suggested that these technological changes might have consequences for the industry’s business models, I was besieged  by defenders of the status quo. Everyone loves (and loves to hate) bookstores and publishers.  

           Airlines place large pre-orders for the latest model planes:  but established carriers find it very difficult to adapt to the market challenges set by low cost carriers.  Their best response has been to set up differentiated subsidiaries to implement the new business model.

Since even babies respond more suspiciously to new ways of doing things than to new toys, we might look for evolutionary explanations.  But why would our distant ancestors have been more ready to hunt new prey, or adopt new tools, than to adapt their routines ?  Perhaps innovations incorporated in physical items are more plainly beneficial than process innovations.  It is hard to argue that a smartphone is not an improvement on an instrument with a large rotary dial tethered to a desk.

        Some gadgets look like improvements, but are not:  three dimensional cameras meet a need that we do not  seem to have, and airships and supersonic planes turned out to be a bust.  But these blind alleys in product innovation are sufficiently rare that they stand out in business and technological history.

          But a low cost airline is not superior to a full service one but rather  the provider of a product better adapted to the needs of modern passengers.Establishing a new routine requires time and practice, and many new routines do not represent improvements in any sense – witness the fate of the majority of business reengineering exercises.  While transformational chief executives and management consultants chafe at the resistance they encounter, the source of the difficulty is not just the lethargy of their subordinates and the scale of their personal investment in established processes. It is  often well founded doubt as to whether the change agents actually know what they are doing. Political leaders, who seek office by claiming that everything their predecessors are doing is wrong, are even more frequently the advocates of useless process reorganisation.

        So we are right to view such novelties with suspicion.  And the behaviour of our children suggests that this well founded scepticism towards those who would reengineer our routines has become hard wired in human responses.