The spotlight is on the innovator. The scientist creating new products. The programmer coding lines upon lines. The artist bending the borders. Their names are on the patent or the print. Hidden behind their glory is the chaos of cultural transformations, of memes building on each other, a tapestry of thoughts and events, and a person building bridges and gently nudging the innovation across chasm.
Good innovators know this. They know that the transfer of innovation needs to be managed. There's somebody just outside the spotlight that champions the innovation and brings it into new location without stepping on the ego of innovators. All the while dancing around the giant hairball of hierarchical authority and Kafkaesque bureaucracy.
Don't be unbothered, happy in your lane
Change doesn't happen when you are "in your lane". Change, innovation, upheaval happens when your switching gears and going into someone's other lane. This other lane can be your alter-ego like Ada Lovelace switching from analytical to poetry.
Even Babbage failed to see this fully; he focused on numbers. But Ada realized that the digits on the cogs could represent things other than mathematical equations.
On Ada Lovelace by Walter Isaacson in The Innovators
This is further exemplified in the subsequent chapter Personal Computer. It was the desire to be free from authority and the technological possibility that came together.
The personal computer was made possible by a number of technological advances, most notably the microprocessor [...] But social forces also help drive and shape [[innovation]]s, which then bear the imprint of the cultural milieu into which they were born. [...] “We wanted there to be personal computers so that we could free ourselves from the constraints of institutions, whether government or corporate.”
On Personal Computer by Walter Isaacson in The Innovators
There's a level of internal curiosity that needs to exists to drive the person forward. Curiosity is the result of an information gap that annoys the hell out of you. Not every information gap leads to research and innovation. Sometimes we just shrug our shoulders and continue living. But other times, we drop everything to fill that gap. It's when we hunt for information, relentlessly pursuing a topic until we know that we know. Without curiosity there is no innovation. The desire to know is the ambition of an innovator.
Seek a busy-body
While the innovator is driven to go deep into a few subjects, the busy-body wanders around the cultural landscape picking up pieces of wisdom here and there. Quite chaotic and subficial from the eye of the innovator.
But innovators and busy-bodies live in a symbiotic relationship. The busy-body, thanks to their diverse but not profound knowledge body, can "translate" between disciplines. It's thanks to these boundary-spanners that lone and crazy innovation become mainstream. But, this is social science, so numbers go up is the wrong mentality. Too many boundary-spanners and your team's performance tanks.
Claims
Innovators need mental and physical space to experiment.
Innovators need to narrow down.
The rebellious streak in innovators is a misinterpretation of their hunger and curiosity to close the information gap.
References
S. Bachall (2019). Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries
W. Isaacson (2015). The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution
D. M. Lydon-Staley and colleagues (2021). Hunters, busybodies and the knowledge network building associated with deprivation curiosity. Nature Human Behavior, 5, 327 - 336
M. L. Thusman (1977). Special Boundary Roles in the Innovation Process. Administrative Science Quarterly, 22, 587-605
