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.
儿童喜欢玩新玩具，但讨厌习惯被打断。这些特性在成年后会一直保持下去：如果把创新融入新玩意中，人们很乐意接受，但涉及改变做事方式的创新，人们就会抵触。
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.
到一所大学四处转转。从表面看，现代信息技术已改变了一切。大多数活动——沟通、排课表和做报告——都是以电子方式完成的。但在更深层次上，一切都没有改变。课程结构、教材和教学法本质上还是老样子。
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.
正如创新经济学家理查德•纳尔逊(Richard Nelson)所指出的那样，当今的美国儿童比过去的儿童健康得多，但他们学习阅读的能力并不比过去强太多。以药丸或注射形式出现的创新很容易被接受，优化流程的创新则不然。
It has always been so. Anaesthetics were developed in the mid-19th century and soon all surgeons were using them. However, when a Viennese physician discovered that the most important thing surgeons could do to keep their patients alive, especially those who were newborn infants, was to wash their hands, the profession resisted the innovation for half a century.
情况一直是如此。麻醉剂是19世纪中期开发出来的，不久之后所有外科医生都开始使用麻醉剂。然而，当一位维也纳内科医生发现，要保住病人、尤其是新生儿的性命，外科医生所能做的最重要的事是洗手时，医疗界抵制这项创新的时间长达半个世纪。
While doctors would readily experiment with new chemicals, they fought any acknowledgment that their procedures were defective.
尽管医生们愿意试验新的化学制剂，但他们竭力拒绝承认自己的治疗程序存在瑕疵。
Authors and editors use computers and software to write and compile, and ereaders are everywhere. Yet any suggestion that these developments imply a different and diminished role for publishers and booksellers is fiercely resisted, both by these businesses and by authors and readers.
如今，写手和编辑使用电脑和软件进行写作和编辑，电子阅览器已无处不在。不过，任何人只要提及这些进展意味着出版商和书商的角色被改变和削弱，都会受到这两者以及作者和读者的强烈抵制。
Airlines place orders for the latest models but established carriers find it hard to adapt to the market challenges set by low-cost carriers. Their response has been to set up distinct subsidiaries to implement[APE?] the new business model. Yet Delta’s Song was sung only briefly and British Airways’ Go went.
航空公司会订购最新型的飞机，但老牌航空公司发现很难针对低价航空公司引发的市场竞争做出调整。它们的对策是设立完全不同的子公司，来执行新的业务模式。不过，达美航空(Delta)的Song只维持了很短时间，而英国航空(British Airways)的Go也已成过去式。
Since even babies are more suspicious of new ways of doing things than of new toys, we might seek evolutionary explanations. But why would our ancestors have been more ready to hunt new prey, or adopt new tools, than to adapt routines? Perhaps innovations incorporated in physical items are more plainly beneficial than process innovations. It is hard to argue that a smartphone is not an improvement on an instrument with a large rotary dial tethered to a desk.[DO WE FULLY ANSWER THIS QUESTION?]
既然就连婴儿对新的做事方式也比对新玩具更怀疑，我们或许可以去寻找进化上的解释。但是，为何相对于调整习惯，我们的祖先更乐于捕捉新猎物或使用新工具呢？或许是，相对于流程创新，融入实物中的创新带来的好处更加一目了然。我们很难主张，相对于被电线固定在桌上、带着很大拨号盘的旧式电话，智能手机不是一种改进。
Some gadgets that look like improvements are not: three-dimensional cameras meet a need we do not seem to have, and airships and supersonic passenger jets turned out to be a bust. These blind alleys in product innovation are sufficiently rare that they stand out in business and technological history.
有些玩意儿看上去有改进，实际上并无改进：3D立体相机满足的是一项我们似乎并不存在的需求，飞艇和超音速客机后来被证明是个失败。这些走进死胡同的产品创新罕见到了能在商业与科技史上占据突出地位。
A low-cost airline, however, is not superior to a full-service one but rather the provider of a product better adapted to the needs of modern passengers. Establishing a new routine requires time and practice, and many new routines do not represent improvements; witness the fate of the majority of business re-engineering exercises. While transformational chief executives and management consultants chafe at the resistance they encounter, the problem is not just the lethargy of subordinates and the scale of their personal investment in established processes. It is often well-founded doubt as to whether the “change agents” actually know what they are doing. Political leaders, who seek office by claiming that everything their predecessors are doing is wrong, are even more frequently the advocates of useless process reorganisation.
然而，不是说低价航空公司优于全业务航空公司，而是说它们提供了一种更符合现代乘客需求的产品。形成新习惯需要时间和实践，而许多新习惯不代表改进；看一看大多数业务流程改造的命运吧。尽管心向革新的首席执行官和管理顾问对遭遇的抵制感到恼火，但问题不仅仅在于下属们的慵懒懈怠以及他们对既定流程已投入个人努力的大小。人们常常有充分理由怀疑“改革推动者”是否真了解自己在做什么。有些政治领导人宣称前任所做一切都是错的，希望借此上台，他们倡导的流程改革甚至更可能是毫无用处的。
So we are right to view such novelties with suspicion. And the behaviour of our children suggests this well-founded scepticism towards those who would re-engineer our routines has become hard wired in human responses.
所以，我们以怀疑眼光看待此类奇思异想是正确的。我们的孩子的行为表明，对于那些想要改造我们习惯的人报以正当的怀疑，已经深深地植入了人类的反应心理中了。