Disrupt or be disrupted. It’s one of the hard lessons emerging in today’s tech-fueled economy, in which the frenetic pace of innovation means not only seeing new ideas materialize with dizzying speed but also watching as they threaten to obliterate entire industries that came before them. We’ve glimpsed this trend in aviation already with everything from old-school radios to paper charts as a number of smart and tenacious newcomers — names like Garmin, Avidyne, Aspen and ForeFlight come to mind — have turned bright ideas into successful start-up business enterprises.
More disruption, we are told, lies ahead. If you’re an airplane manufacturer still turning out products first conceived of in the 1940s or 1950s — and you don’t have anything revolutionary in the planning stages — the time to panic is now.
