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What Disruptive Innovators Do Differently is a book excerpt appearing in the Harvard Business Review.

The excerpt highlights what the author suggests are five qualities of successful “disruptive innovators” who have transformed industries or cultures.  It seems to me that the same five elements would need to be present in anyone who wants to dramatically transform education.

They are:

Customer obsession

Curiosity

Collaboration

Willingness to experiment

Persistence

The excerpt in HBR uses stories from Julia Child’s life to illustrate each of these characteristics.

In education, I wonder if Maria Montessori, John Dewey, Thurgood Marshall and Horace Mann could be four people in U.S. history who have been “disruptive innovators”? It would be intriguing to look at their lives through the lens of those five qualities.