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When I was growing up, I remember quite distinctly the day when one of my teachers taught me the definition of the word punctual. She said it meant “being on time,” and that meant being neither too early, nor too late. I was told that being too early throws off the balance; it comes off as being too needy or desperate. The definition was sealed tight in my mind with the cliché of the right person being at the right place at the right time, not sooner.

The definitions we grow up with define who we become. I realized soon enough that teachers aren’t all the same; the teachers that most of my colleagues had while they were growing up defined punctual as “being early—way, way early.” And so, most of them arrive for a meeting almost an hour ahead of time and conjure up reasons to get me there as well. Then again, in a country where we often line up outside embassies the evening before an appointment, perhaps definitions also could vary. Definitions, in other words, are contextual.

Our society is based on a mechanism of learning. Some-one goes through an experience, then someone else goes through the same experience, following which someone writes a report on it. With a few more instances of this, and with enough evidence of the cause and effect, it turns into a fact of life.

Knowledge that we derive through reading and second-hand sources is just this, as is, for that matter, everything that’s taught in schools, colleges and even that sacred business school! But there is a fundamental flaw here. The key to ‘flipping an industry’ is to aim straight at the base. The base is built up of years and years of knowledge that, like everything else, expires over time.

Revisiting these assumptions is a daunting task—and it takes a disrupter to do so. Not everyone would appreciate such probing of established ideas, but all supposed ‘knowledge’ must be revisited from time to time. That‘s the birthplace of innovation, philosophies, revolutions, and all things that make a civilization what it is.

All around us, there are plenty of basic assumptions we can challenge. Why do computers have to be built on digital outputs? Aren’t the very limitations of artificial learning based on that? What if India and China start consuming like the West does (India, today, consumes 1/15th the energy that the West does, and rural India consumes 1/15th of the energy that urban India does!)? Should we go back to Direct Current (DC) for our appliances, since we no longer generate and distribute it and since residential solar panels are becoming a reality?

In the words of Jostein Gaarder, the author of Sophie’s World, “We all need to climb to the top of the rabbit’s hair,” to go back to the questions of our childhood, to see the enormous amounts of discrepancies in the world around us. To stay in that mindset, to dare impossibilities and not fear failing with a few crazy ideas, to have your ideas change the world—that’s the mind of a disrupter. Our country could use this mentality—not just a select few, but all of us.

As debates about whether India can be a superpower rage, we need to define the very nature of what a superpower is today. In the immortal words of Rabindranath Tagore, “March on, call them and invite them to join you. Even if they don’t, have the courage to march alone. Someday they will see the light.” That goes for business and innovation as well.

VIJAY ANAND is the Founder of Proto.in and the Vice President (Incubation) of IITM’s RTBI.

©Entrepreneur November 2010

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innovation, Vijay Anand