The Varieties of Innovation Experience

If you have accepted ‘innovator’ as some part of your identity, what sort of innovator are you? I offer here a dictionary of personality types I’ve encountered in the 10 years I’ve been in the business, and offer some of my favorite examples from history. But before I let you have fun trying to recognize yourself in my list, a word of explanation is in order. I have always been unhappy with the usual definition of innovation — as invention successfully taken to market. This definition is of the sort David Foster Wallace calls “deeply trivial” (he coins that phrase in Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity and provides an elegant example: “because it is illegal” as an answer to the question, “why is it wrong to kill?”). So here we go: a better definition of innovation, and a taxonomy of innovation styles, with apologies to William James.

A Better Definition of Innovation

My definition of innovation is based on the notion of creative destruction, which I wrote about recently.

Innovation is deliberate, growth-oriented creative destruction in a social context.

It took me a while to come up with that. I decided several years ago that my personal definition of innovation was going to be based on creative destruction, since anything that I recognize as an innovation seems to have an element of that dynamic. But I was bothered by the fact that pretty much any activity destroys some, creates some. Even assembly-line drudge-work can be home to jury-rigged creative improvisation. For a while I thought I needed to add an arbitrary threshold (“sufficiently powerful” or some such), but that didn’t satisfy me. Then, reflecting on how weight training is about tearing down your muscles so they can rebuild stronger, made me add deliberate as the right qualification. Normal physical activity also tears down and rebuilds muscle, but weight training is a deliberate activity to that end. I added growth-oriented drawing inspiration from the same metaphor: athletes who weight-train make sure they drink protein shakes after working out, to make sure the reconstruction involves growth in muscle mass. Finally, I added in a social context, since you could imagine an isolated hermit-scholar-warrior growing his brain (and maybe his muscles) in the jungle, and to me it’s only innovation if your deliberate effort is directed outward, at the body politic, rather than yourself (Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi, in Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention offers a social definition of creativity for similar reasons).

The Dictionary of Innovation Styles

The ideas of Hegel and Nietzsche (mangled, to be sure), gave us creative destruction on the scale of World War II (which gave us the holocaust, but also radar, space flight and jet engines). So let’s look around and inventory every personality type that can drive deliberate creative-destruction behaviors from that level down. You and I have no use for tepid distinctions like theorist and experimentalist, or engineer and scientist, which belong to the 19th century. This dictionary is far from complete, and even staying at this coarse level, there are many more types that could be added without getting into hierarchical refinement. But I’ll stop with the 18 I have on the list so far rather than hopelessly attempt to complete my inventory. In alphabetical order, here goes.

1. Aesthete: Beauty has a place in innovation. An innovation is often in some way more beautiful than what it destroys and replaces. My own ideas about its role have to do with certain notions of symmetry and complexity. Prototype: Murray Gell-Mann, who reportedly said, “In fundamental physics, beauty is a very successful criterion for choosing the right theory.”
2. Builder: Making innovation actually happen requires a phenomenal amount of energy, raw intelligence and the sheer energy and ambition for a serious fight. Prototype: Edison.
3. Conceptual Architect: A synthesizer who takes an empty space of new possibilities, and imagines a whole constructible reality within it. Unlike the visionary, who is able to imagine a great deal of what can happen, synthesizers pick out a single reality that should and will happen. Prototype: Alan Kay (conceptualizer of the personal computing revolution, who famous remarked that the easiest way to predict the future is to invent it).
4. Discoverer: A discoverer is somebody paying enough attention to what he/she is doing, and actually doing enough interesting things thoughtfully, to notice something special. The quintessential prepared mind that fortune favors. Prototype: Alexander Fleming, with runner-up Wilhelm Roentgen.
5. Cross-preneur: The true decathlete among innovators, the cross-preneur has enough of the abilities in this dictionary (at amateurish levels) to nearly single-handedly cause innovation to occur in any context. I wrote about cross-preneurship in this piece. Prototype: Bill Gates.
6. Craftsperson: Every creative-destruction revolution needs its foot-soldiers. The craftsperson is it. Since there are typically too many in a given revolution, they rarely get famous, and are basically significantly less-talented versions of the aesthetes. Prototype: Thomas Watson, who came when Graham Bell called, thus rising out of obscurity.
7. Entrepreneur: A more limited version of the cross-preneur, this individual is also a decathlete who can amateurishly play enough of this entire list of roles to cause significant innovation to happen nearly single-handed. But unlike the cross-preneur, sticks to the open economy. Prototype: Edison (the only 2-category prototype)
8. Entailment Architect: Once a foundationalist destroys an existing edifice of ideas, the entailment architect steps in and rebuilds a stronger one, by figuring out everything the rewired assumptions imply. Unlike the foundationalist, the entailment architect has the breadth to look at the whole and the precision to worry about the uninteresting, but important details. Prototype: Minkowski
9. Foundationalist: Looks at the underlying assumptions of everything, and tears out and replaces weak ones. Prototype: Einstein, but my favorite is Claude Shannon.
10. Genius: The genius — and no, Einstein wasn’t one — actually exists, and plays a role. The genius is simply that unique instrument who can just do things that nobody else can. Sometimes a necessary part of an innovation is just so phenomenally difficult to achieve that it takes a kind of concentrated mental horsepower within a single skull to keep all the pieces together long enough for a particular breakthrough to occur. Think of the genius as the containment chamber for a fusion reaction, capable of actually applying the enormous pressures and magnetic fields to make the reaction happen. Prototype: Richard Feynman.
11. Intrapreneur: Like an entrepreneur, but peculiarly fond of the conditions inside a corporation, rather than in the open markets. Prototype: John Dessauer, of Xerox.
12. Inventor: Again, this character from classical theories of innovation actually exists, and in pure form is more like a poet than anything else. Their signature attribute is an ability to tell Rube Goldberg contraption ideas apart from ideas that are worth more attention. Prototype: Chester Carlson, inventor of Xerography. Carlson is almost a comic-book character, try David Owen’s Copies in Seconds to see why Carlson was much more of a pure-bred inventor than even Edison.
13. Leader: Much of this dictionary is about the technological side of innovation. But it takes a business leader to take that huge leap of faith and attempt to create a market that doesn’t exist yet. Prototype: Steve Jobs.
14. Operationalizer: Foundationalists, Visionaries and both types of Architect in this dictionary have one thing in common: they don’t like ugliness. But mental models, no matter how powerful, are always finite, while reality has the two unpleasant features of being effectively infinite in its complexity, and peculiarly specific in the conditions it creates. Operationalizers don’t wait for ideal conditions, or worry about parts of reality that don’t fit the vision. They charge ahead, armed with duct-tape and just get it done, no matter how much the realization mars the beauty of the concept. Prototype: Robert Oppenheimer.
15. Orchestrator: This is a very curious type of individual who occurs rarely in history — they are the catalysts who apparently contribute nothing directly to an innovation, but are actually instrumental in making things happen. I suspect the best venture capitalists are of this type. Prototype: Robert Taylor, who started by making the Internet happen at DARPA, and then, for an encore, making personal computing happen at PARC. They have the capacity to understand what visionaries, conceptual architects and entailment architects are saying, and the pragmatic mindset capable of creating conditions that allow the builders to actually create the potential impact.
16. Priest: The priest, as a cultural archetype, is usually viewed as a preserver, rather than a creative-destroyer. In the world of innovation, you think of those who are religious about rigor and method, and usually very very good at being rigorous and methodical themselves. They rarely have that volatile, unbalanced mix of sloppy creativity and too much energy to cause large creative-destruction events, but when roped into a larger cataclysm, they are the ones who enable jury-rigged contraptions and half-baked ideas to be rebuilt solidly, and placed on the foundation of fully-baked ideas. Priests are enlightened technicians.
17. Social Entrepreneur: Again, similar to the entrepreneur, but working with an innovative idea about human beings. Prototype: Gandhi.
18. Visionary: Yes, people genuinely deserving of this title have existed. The most remarkable one in all history (and no, I am not exaggerating) was Vannevar Bush. He imagined the Internet and a lot more in the single most influential piece of popular science writing: As We May Think, published in The Atlantic Monthly, in 1945. But he was no armchair visionary: he was also among the founding fathers of control theory and computing, and was responsible for the key organizational features of modern American innovation, including a surprisingly impactful piece of bean-counterism: the indirect cost support model for research institutions. If you don’t know who he is, you are seriously undereducated about innovation, and you should subscribe to this blog and watch out for my upcoming piece about him. His contemporary and colleague, Norbert Wiener, was nearly as powerful a visionary (oddly he is better known — for Cybernetics, , but had less actual impact on the course of history).

I suppose there ought to be a lot more varieties on this list, but that’s it for now. For the record, there are a lot of Xerox-related examples on this list mainly because they come readily to mind for me, though some would end up on the list of prototypes no matter who was filling in the blanks.

What sort are you? Me, I don’t know yet.