innovator
See Also
Definition
From Pontin, 2006, Attributes of successful innovators --
- Successful innovators are famously untroubled by the prospect of failure.
- More profoundly, many innovators appreciate failure.
- Innovators commonly recognize that ""problems and questions are the limiting resource in innovation,"" says Ed Boyden, a Stanford University neurobiologist. He means that difficult questions are thrilling: ""If we take a really hard question, like 'What is consciousness?' or 'How do we store memories?', it's not even clear how we should even approach the problem.""
- Innovators find inspiration in disparate disciplines.
- Innovation flourishes when organizations allow third-party experimentation with their products.
- Fragility is the enemy of innovation: systems should boast broad applications and be unbreakable.
- Real innovators delight in giving us what we want: solutions to our difficulties and expansive alternatives to our established ways.
- Innovators are sometimes perplexed by our ignorance of our own needs.
- Successful innovators do not depend on what economists call ""network externalities"" (where a system, like a fax machine, has little use to its first user, but becomes increasingly valuable as more people use it): ""Ideally, the system should be useful for user number one,"" says Schachter. Hence, innovators can divine needs by applying a utilitarian imperative: they ask, Would the innovation help someone now?
- Many innovators become technologists because they want to better the world.