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Disruption Is More Than the Buzzword It's Become Looking for opportunity? Check to see where the stagnant reside.

By Amy Cosper

This story appears in the June 2015 issue of Entrepreneur. Subscribe »

Morgan Sessions | Unsplash

The twisty, curvy road to innovation is lined by a boneyard of failures, some catastrophic and some less so. Call them what you will—flameouts, burnouts, cash burners, dogs—the end result is the same: road pizza.

But this is not unexpected. Any time you introduce change and herald new ways of thinking, failure is a possibility.

In an organization, stagnation by lack of innovation is a death knell. This is the part where the big, slow-moving, keep-as-is companies tend to get knocked into the boneyard. Some people simply cannot embrace innovation. Politicians, policymakers and old-school accountants are not prone to change. (Nor is Russia, but that's another story.)