From Idle to Idol: Identifying the Innovator’s Lifecycle

?“Success is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration.”

Let me start this article by recounting some things I heard in my physics class back in school. Please don’t run away, dear reader; I’ll make it super quick and won’t mention the boring laws, just the stories of the innovators behind them. Once upon a time, in the late summer of 1666, to be exact, Sir Isaac Newton was dinged on the head by a heavy apple from one of his garden's trees. This is how he discovered the universal laws of gravitation. The second story happened a couple of millennia earlier. It concerns Archimedes, who was soaking in a nice, hot bath. As a result, he discovered the laws of buoyancy, and the young innovator leaped out of the bathtub and ran through the streets of Syracuse naked, crying, “Eureka! Eureka!” (translated: “I’ve found it! I’ve found it!”). And the world lived happily ever after.

In this article, I’ll try to reveal the path that innovators take to change the world. So, bring a heavy apple, prepare a nice hot bath (wear a swimsuit to avoid any embarrassing street encounters later), and let’s hunt some eurekas.

?I – The Journey Innovators Go Through

In my humble opinion, the path of innovation can be traced in one of two ways—either by following the journey of the innovative idea itself from inception to impact or by following the innovator’s journey from zero to hero. Because innovation is about innovative ideas, the first method is simpler and more straightforward, right? Well, not quite. I’ll tell you why. Ideas are not tangible things that you can draw boundaries around. In the world of innovation, ideas can be modified, generalized, descoped, merged, split, or even burned to create better ideas out of their ashes in no time. Although this method is the dominant one in the innovation management literature, such as the journey of technology readiness levels (TRLs), I still believe that it is next to impossible to accurately follow the journey of an innovative idea from start to finish. On the other hand, if you leave aside ideas created solely by generative AI apps, innovators are people who have unique names and unchangeable ID numbers, which makes following them in their innovation journeys more practical. This doesn’t mean that there are no complications, as in the previous method. The main problem that makes this second method a bit complex is the fact that the journey of most innovations involves more than one person, either because the journey of an innovation was taken by a group of innovators from start to finish, such as a team or an entity, or when an innovator hands their idea to another person or entity along the journey, such as when a corporation buys a patent from an individual researcher. However, I’ll go with the second method because it’s less complex.

Before I walk you, dear reader, through my proposed description of the innovator’s journey, let’s assume the following for now:

1. The term “innovator” may refer to a person, a team, or an entity.
2. As with the beauty of nature’s infinite life journeys, the end of each innovator’s journey should somehow be connected to the beginning of another innovator’s new journey (life cycle).
3. As in nature, the number of innovators who start the journey is way larger than the number of those who reach its end successfully.
4. An innovator’s journey may start somewhere before reaching an innovative idea and end somewhere after commercializing it.

If these four assumptions make sense to you, then I think the following proposal might get your attention.

As shown in the above diagram, I have reworked some of the published models of innovators' journeys into five stages and four steps. To mitigate my embarrassing forgetfulness, I made the names of all nine components start with the letter i. So, let me walk you through my I x 9 Innovator’s life cycle, which is the funnel I described briefly in an earlier article a year ago.

II – The Inquiring Step: From Idle to Intention

First, let’s figure out where to start. The innovator’s life cycle won’t start from an egg, of course. But wait a minute. Does a person’s creative ability start from birth or later on in life? In other words, are creative and innovative abilities inherited or learned? Maybe I’ll leave the long old/new debate regarding this tricky question to another article sometime in the future, but I’ll share with you right now the answer I believe in, which could be revealed by looking at an interesting experiment. In 1973, a group of scientists published a study in which they administered several creativity tests to 63 pairs of twins who were 13–19 years old. To make a long story short, they failed to prove the existence of a significant similarity in creative abilities between the members of each pair of twins. The catch here is that these pairs consisted of identical twins who inherited the same set of genes from their parents. This leads to the conclusion that the environment around a person throughout their life plays a major role in enhancing or diminishing their creative abilities.

So, where do we start? Because not everyone we know is currently an innovator, even though innovation is a skill that can be learned by almost anyone, it’s logical to consider the first step in the innovator’s life cycle to be about building the desire to enter the world of innovation. Before this step, the potential innovator doesn’t have to be someone with a high IQ score. At the very least, he or she should have a minimum level of food, water, shelter, safety, health, and education. In other words, the basic levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs should have been met. However, before starting the journey, his or her interest in innovation was zero. This is why I call a person at this stage an idle innovator. So, the first step for this idle innovator is to be somehow inspired and trained by someone to increase their understanding of and attraction to the world of innovation. I call this step inquiring. This step ends when the idle innovator is transformed into one who has a serious intention to pursue the journey of innovation. The description of this step and the innovator’s life cycle so far have been limited to human individuals, but with some slight modifications, the previous and the following discussions can also be applied to innovative entities.

III – The Ideating Step: From Intention to Invention

At the beginning of this second step, we have a person who has decided to start innovating but doesn’t know what to innovate. which is a stage that I call intention. From this point, the person proceeds by using whatever information, tools, and techniques are available to identify a promising problem, need, or opportunity and to create an appropriate innovative idea to address it in a way that increases positive returns and/or decreases negative outcomes. This step, which I call ideating, can be performed in other scenarios as well. For instance, the innovator first discovers something interesting and then later finds an innovative use of that discovery to deal with a problem, need, or opportunity. Another example is taking an existing idea and improving it or using it in a new context. For more examples, see one of my earlier articles . The end of this step will be reached when the innovator acquires a clear and practical innovative idea, which I call the invention stage. In many cases, the innovator will be able to secure ownership of their innovative idea through one or more tools of intellectual property rights, such as utility patents, utility models, design patents, plant patents, and copyrights. Other innovators keep their innovative ideas as trade secrets or try to surprise the market and benefit from the so-called first-mover advantage.

IV – The Implementing Step: From Invention to Income

I don’t want to be harsh on any innovator, but a great game-changing innovative idea is worth nothing—totally nothing—unless someone puts it to use and gets something useful out of it. Thus, this leads us to what I call the implementing step. Conceptually, the innovator here designs the details of the innovative idea, prototypes the design, tests the prototype, and commercializes the resulting product or service. In reality, it’s complicated. For example, innovators usually go back and forth between this step and the previous one, the ideating step, to brainstorm and retest several modifications until a satisfactory version is reached or discard the idea altogether and start all over again to ideate a new innovative idea. Another example is when the innovator delegates the process of implementing the idea to other individuals or entities, either by selling the patent to a corporation or by partnering with entrepreneurs, who will take care of the implementation and commercialization tasks. A final example of the diverse ways in which an idea can be monetized is when a company buys the innovator’s precious idea without any intention of producing it. I know that this seems counterintuitive, but feel free to search for the strategies of non-practicing entities (NPEs) and explore the other side of the intellectual property rights world—a side that is not so bright.

Whatever the implementation approach, innovators complete this critical step when they reach what I call the income stage—that is, when they succeed in gaining reasonable commercial benefits from the implementation of their ideas, either by themselves or through their partners and clients. Commercial benefits include, but are not limited to, increased revenue or brand value or reduced current expenses or losses.

V – The Inspiring Step: From Income to Idol

If you were in a hurry, the income stage described above might mark the end of the traditional innovator’s journey. Nonetheless, if you are seeking the point where the innovator’s life cycle comes full circle, then you need to hear about the inspiring step. When you see an innovator’s idea come to life and start generating income, you know that a great story of a successful innovator is in the making. Only a tiny percentage of innovators make it to the income stage. As a result, successful ones are desirable subjects for media shows, news and magazines, guest speeches, and motivational books. The more these stories include implementation news and jaw-dropping deals, the more they inspire hesitant innovators, or as I called them at the beginning of the life cycle, idle innovators. You can easily prove this for yourself by looking for the answers in published interviews with thriving innovators when they are asked questions like, What inspired you to become an innovator? You’ll find that the majority of them mention their emotional attachment to the stories of other successful innovators.

Now, what would mark the end of this final step—the inspiring step? If you ask Mother Nature, or perhaps Father Nature to be politically correct, the answer would be that the life cycle of any living thing ends at the end of its life. So, the end of an innovator’s life cycle will be death if the innovator is a person, or bankruptcy if the innovator is an enterprise. But since it’s not a must to currently exist to inspire others, it mostly takes just a good story to do that. And a good story never dies.

However, I’ve called the stage which could mark the end of the inspiring step and the innovator’s overall lifecycle as the idol stage. No one can reach this stage, except for the few successful innovators who have become well-known icons in the innovation world. Examples of idol innovators include Abu Al Qasim Al Zahrawi (a.k.a. Albucasis), who innovated operative surgery, and the Kodak Company, which was the actual innovator of the film photography industry. Thus, idol innovators inspire new idle innovators, and the lifecycle begins again.

?VI – Final Thoughts

I really don’t want to ruin the science tales you’ve enjoyed, but I have evidence-based doubts that the events involving Newton’s apple and Archimedes’ bathtub actually happened. And if they did, those single events definitely weren’t the main causes of the resulting positive change in the world. The main causes were the countless days of research carried out by Newton and Archimedes before these events and the numerous innovators who turned those laws into amazing products afterward.

Regardless of this and that, my third and final story from my physics class was about an American who had been inspired by past pioneers to innovate, conducted hundreds of experiments to invent the most effective electric light bulb, cofounded the General Electric (GE) Corporation to implement his electric illumination systems commercially, and inspired generations past and generations to come. He is, of course, the most famous inventor of all time, Thomas A. Edison, who said the quote with which I started my article. So, my dear reader, it’s time for you to jump up from Archimedes’ bathtub, eat Newton’s apple, and join Edison’s search in the market for Eurekas.