Anybody can mingle scripture with the philosophies of men, and frankly, it’s not only easy but fun, too. Here’s my most recent attempt. It’s the abstract of a presentation I’m giving on Thursday at BYU, 3:45 pm, Clyde Building, Room 254, for the Chemical Engineering graduate seminar program).

Disruptive Innovation: Lessons from Theory and Experience, with an Intellectual Property Twist

“We have learned by sad experience that it is the nature and disposition of almost all corporations, as soon as they get a little market share, as they suppose, that they will immediate begin to exercise short-sighted dominion. Hence many disruptive innovations are culled, and few are chosen.”

“Disruptive innovation” has become a popular business term, yet is often used so loosely as to be meaningless. Thorough analysis of disruptive innovation has been provided in scholarly work from Dr. Clayton Christensen of the Harvard School of Business and others. Here we explore lessons from theory and experience–the kind of experience that many engineers may face in their careers. The sad reality is that seemingly sound decision making processes almost ensure that large corporations will ignore or even actively kill some of the most important innovations that arise in their field of business. It is vital that future innovators understand this phenomenon and develop strategies to deal with it.

Useful tools for mitigating the challenges of disruptive innovation come from a crucial field rarely mentioned in publications on disruptive innovation: intellectual assets such as patents and defensive publications. These tools can be used to secure disruptive opportunities that might otherwise be ignored or quashed by a corporation, or to avert threats from competitive disruptive innovations that might otherwise be neglected until it is too late. Our growing experience with “disruptive intellectual assets” suggests that this approach may be a valuable strategy for protecting a business and strengthening innovation systems.

The warped citation, of course, comes from the book Disruption and Corporations, Section 121.

I hesitate – only hesitate – to play around with a verse from LDS scripture in this manner, and also recognize that not all of the audience will be familiar with the original passage, but figured that as long as only a few souls are lost, why not?