Yes. Policy disruption depends on political will and courage and indeed vision often in the absence of evidence and in the face of the status quo, powerful vested interest groups, and bureaucratic inertia.

The challenges include 1. evidence for the policy innovation (it may be lacking, or no one else has done this before, so fear of being first); 2. the inherent conservatism of civil services in framing policy options (status quo, rent seeking, etc.); 3. intellectually lazy civil service thinking (failure to conduct good problem analysis, jurisdictional review); 4. poor use of evidence (e.g. using local/national experts, but who are not very good); 5; expert capture (having disruptive thinking converted into problems advisors/experts know something about, to replace the problem or desired disruption (this is a bias toward evidence and away from courage).

Whether the concept of disruptive innovation can be applied to policy depends on how one defines disruption. There is no doubt that companies live or die by innovation: to respond to market pressures and stay competitive they invest in organizational, technical, and social novelties and reward handsomely for new or significantly improved products, services, processes, and methods of delivery (or other elements of their business model(s). Where the innovation is disruptive, it creates a new market and value network, or at least impacts these, displacing earlier "technology". By contrast, the public sector often merely hopes for incremental improvement. Admittedly, the public realm should remain legible and coherent and the public sector should be a stabilizing force; unlike the private sector, the public sector operates under an exigent set of concerns, demands, interests, pressures, and restrictions, that political economy best explains. Is it reasonable, for example, to seek disruptive change when people's lives are at stake? This said, in the public sector too, business as usual has become business at risk: lest they forget, public sector organizations must wait on stakeholders and shareholders—perceptions, never mind evidence, that they do not create public value will dissuade the hand that feeds them and lead to destitution. If only because of the size of the public sector, there are rich opportunities for its organizations to develop explicit systems to eliminate, reduce, raise, and create for value. In the final analysis, whether this is done with a capital or lower case "d" may be moot, perhaps even irrelevant since everything is relative. "It doesn't matter whether a cat is white or black, as long as it catches mice." Innovation in the Public Sector, available at http://www.adb.org/publications/innovation-public-sector, expands on all this.

Absolutely yes! Think about the sectors that are considered as non innovative because of the regulation they have: recent laws in italy on heritage sites and museums open to new ways of managing cultural resources. from now on, disruptive innovation is necessary to compete in global markets.