Innovation ranks high among our culture’s most cherished attributes, a key underpinning for progress and prosperity. So it’s a little shocking to consider how innovation once was considered more of a threat than a boon.
In the 16th and 17th Centuries, “innovators” drew scorn as disrupters who threatened the established political or religious order. “Traitorous innovators,” Shakespeare thundered in one of his plays, and Scottish writer James Boswell lumped together “modern infidels and innovators” as “all vain men.”
