Diffusion of Innovation

On November 27 at the TCS Innovation Lab for Business Systems Dr.VCS Prasad made a
presentation on the diffusion of innovation in an organization that I found very interesting. I mention here only two points that he made.

One is the folly of trying to push a new idea into an unready environment: an early negative
reaction can spread quickly by word of mouth and jeopardise the idea. The other is the importance of slack (uncommitted) resources. Unless an organization has slack resources it
is not possible for it to experiment with new ideas.

When Bertrand Russel said that boredom leads to creativity, and that children should have
plenty of opportunity to be bored. he was emphasizing the importance of slack resources in
one's personal life. One has time to be playful only when all resources are not committed to
the To-Do-List. Are you a list maker? When you do something not on the list do you write it
down and then cross it out? If so it is time to pause and re-think your life.

The spirit of computing is best understood if we approach computing as play. Hope to
elaborate on this in a future post.