IT Blog

Significant innovations often require “epistemological ruptures,” a notion introduced in 1938 by the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard that was recast as “paradigm shifts” by Thomas Kuhn in his 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. As relevant as the expression may be to describe the unexpected advent of an invention or innovation, it does it from the point of view of the inventor/innovator or as an after-the-fact observation. In reality, there is rarely an immediate or even clear line of demarcation between a “before” and an “after,” or any form of substitution phenomenon. This doesn’t necessarily happen overnight, even for scientific discoveries, let alone for economic or societal innovation.

Cars didn’t kill horses. It’s one thing to shift paradigms; it’s another to understand how they crawl into the mores. The adoption of an innovation is often more akin to what I’m calling a paradigm drift, an expression that I’m basing on what the…