Several times I have referred to this observation about how ideas connect to ideology.
“Ideas lead technology. Technology leads organizations. Organizations lead institutions. Then ideology brings up the rear, lagging all the rest — that’s when things really get set in concrete.”—Charles Green (2009)
Here are some examples of these shifts.
Ideas lead technology
Hedy Lamarr invented spread spectrum technology in 1941 but its value as a technology accelerated half a century later as it would, “galvanize the digital communications boom, forming the technical backbone that makes cellular phones, fax machines and other wireless operations possible.”
Peter Senge’s book, The Fifth Discipline, ushered in the idea of the learning organization but it was only recently that organizations had the Web 2.0 technologies to enable distributed team learning or share systems-thinking across the enterprise.