Children love to play with new toys but hate disruption to their routines. These traits persist in adult life: innovation is readily adopted when it is incorporated in new gadgets but innovation that involves doing things differently is resisted.
Look around a university. At a superficial level, modern information technology has changed everything. Most activities — communication, scheduling and presentations — are conducted electronically. At a deeper level, nothing at all has changed. The course structures, materials and the methods of pedagogy remain essentially the same.
As Richard Nelson, the economist of innovation, has pointed out while American children are much healthier than they once were they are not much better at learning to read. Innovation that comes in a pill or injection is easily adopted: innovation that manages a process better is not.