Disruption Is More Than the Buzzword It's Become Looking for opportunity? Check to see where the stagnant reside.

The twisty, curvy road to innovation is lined by a boneyard of failures, some catastrophic and some less so. Call them what you will—flameouts, burnouts, cash burners, dogs—the end result is the same: road pizza.

But this is not unexpected. Any time you introduce change and herald new ways of thinking, failure is a possibility.

In an organization, stagnation by lack of innovation is a death knell. This is the part where the big, slow-moving, keep-as-is companies tend to get knocked into the boneyard. Some people simply cannot embrace innovation. Politicians, policymakers and old-school accountants are not prone to change. (Nor is Russia, but that's another story.)