The Five Habits of Great Innovators

Based on six to seven years of careful research, I'm pleased to announce that I can add several qualities to that list. Innovators generally:

  1) Interact with their environment in some way.
  2) Acquire between one and a hundred languages.
  3) Breathe oxygen.
  4) Innovate somewhere in some way.

Seriously, though, why do these fluff pieces never acknowledge phenomena like survivorship bias or inherent sampling error? I know plenty of people with these qualities who innovate nothing at all. Is this about necessary conditions, as opposed to sufficient ones? Is it just about neat correlations devoid of actual significance? Why do we never look at people who try but fail at innovating? Their biographies are equally or more instructive.

Well, enough complaining. The world is in dire need of sub-par business blogging. Continue.

Re: #4, Disruptive Mindset - I'm reading Christensen's third book on disruption, where he talks about 1. the "shield" of asymmetric motivation (competitors don't care about this market - but you do); and 2. the "sword" of asymmetric skills (where over time, you build up the skills of making your technology work, reaching your customers, and making money out of the business model - but your competitor hasn't).

And I'm thinking it may be applicable like this: 1. work on creating a product/service that you personally would find interesting and worthwhile as a user. This automatically won't be what the established companies are doing (it's boring); yet will have some benefit to it, even if the initial version doesn't yet exhibit it. 2. find customers who also value that, and serve them. Work hard at making the business work.

One of the most important requisite to be able to innovate is solitude. The ability to disconnect from the crowd, clear out your brain, spend some time with yourself, look within for your own voice and thoughts, and reflect upon them. You need to practice this to be able to mental time travel, to realize interconnected systems, to be able to shift frames, to be an “outthinker” with a disruptive mindset, to gather enough passion to influence others.

One simple quote from the article that I liked:

"Sometimes just changing your perspective reveals the answer"

I doubt those are habits, they seem more like abilities. A lot of people have these abilities, but great innovators can also manage themselves and actually do something...

Uhm, and there were no Taoists 5000 years ago.

Well, I have zero of those habits. I suppose it's good that I wasn't planning on innovating anytime soon, then.

If it were so easy to break down the process of innovation into an objective list of attributes then these people wouldn't be writing these articles they'd be founding companies and changing industries.

Those who can, do. Those who can't, write articles about doing.