If someone else had said it, it would have sounded like any cookie-cutter corporate consultant telling office workers to think outside the box. But when calls for "disruptive technologies" are coming from Andrew Grove, cofounder of the Intel Corp. and renowned management superguru, people sit up and listen.

GROVE

In his speech this month at the inauguration of the new Grove School of Engineering at The City College of New York, Grove encouraged students in the audience and engineers in general to find new solutions to some of the seemingly intractable problems of the world today. [Grove gave $26 million to the school last year, the largest donation in its history.] As Grove defines it, disruptive technologies " do a modest job and then improve on it." Citing specific advances made in the United States' healthcare management and energy industry, Grove sees great potential for creative uses of engineering principles to solve major world problems.

These " disruptive technologies" can come in many forms, and sometimes take the form of simple, pragmatic business choices. In tackling healthcare costs and inefficiencies, Grove said " we simply need to be engineers and reduce costs step-by-step, item-by-item like our predecessors and colleagues do daily in many other lines of business." Grove's speech was an appeal to people in all industries, telling them not to be afraid of breaking with current business models in pursuit of solutions.

Examples of this effect can be seen in the recent growth of green building techniques in the construction industry. As designs have become more financially viable, building green is looking less like an expensive fad and more like an important aspect of construction's future. But green building could never have happened without thousands of little " disruptive technologies," developed by countless engineers and architects, who were willing to experiment with ideas written off by many as too expensive or outlandish. In a way, Grove's " disruptive technology" is just a euphemism for what engineers are trained to do in the first place: find new solutions to problems as they arise and improve upon previous solutions.

Yet the main obstacles to developing Grove's disruptive technologies are usually not technological. Grove's message is also aimed at business culture itself, and its aversion to change and untraditional approaches. Sadly, what the business world often fails to understand is that sometimes the most radical-sounding solutions turn out to be the most viable and profitable.

Corporate inertia isn't the only threat to disruptive technologies. Despite the rewards that may come as a result, there is usually some opposition to even the smallest of clever ideas, and many potential advances have been sacrificed on the altar of office politics. Engineers and others will never have the freedom to develop these disruptive technologies unless there is a business atmosphere that encourages and rewards that level of creative thinking. Otherwise the term will just become another forgotten buzzword, and business leaders will continue to wonder why the competition always seems to have the good ideas.