Enabling individuals as a force for innovation

Ideas are the fuel for innovation; can we create a common framework for harnessing the power of ideas from the widest possible network in 2023?

As 2023 begins, I am launching my plans shared here and here. In my previous edition, I explored the importance of ideas for innovating the future of distribution and suggested a frame for making ideas more actionable as use cases. Below, I offer insights that are essential for making progress. I drop the “quick take” and “deep dive” monikers from my newsletter titles as all editions share ideas and methodologies for implementing them. I am working on expanding my reach to anyone that is in any way connected to distribution, including customers, owners, distributors, manufacturers, technologists, financiers, policymakers, and more. I need your help. Please share this newsletter and offer your suggestions. 2023 is off to a fast start, and I’m looking forward to making a difference in the months ahead.

Putting ideas to work

Ideas are essential for envisioning the future of distribution. Ideas inspire. Ideas upend the conventional way of doing business, set new standards for productivity and growth, and focus on applying digital technology to achieve exponential benefits. Ideas are not proprietary, and when shared, discussed, and debated, ideas are the lifeblood that enables entire industries to remain relevant as megatrends transform how business is done. Ideas are essential, but ideas alone are not enough. Ideas require people to put them into action.

Think Steve Jobs. Writing in Harvard Business Review, biographer Walter Isaacson lays out what Jobs—armed with ideas and driven to implement them—accomplished:

His saga is the entrepreneurial creation myth writ large: Steve Jobs cofounded Apple in his parents’ garage in 1976, was ousted in 1985, returned to rescue it from near bankruptcy in 1997, and by the time he died, in October 2011, had built it into the world’s most valuable company. Along the way he helped to transform seven industries: personal computing, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, retail stores, and digital publishing. He thus belongs in the pantheon of America’s great innovators, along with Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Walt Disney.

It may not come to pass that a great innovator like Steve Jobs will emerge to transform distribution. But it may be possible to gather, develop, and empower a community to embrace ideas for innovating distribution and to implement them. Empowering distribution’s innovators may be done by individual companies, educators, and incubators or through initiatives and investments by industry and professional organizations that represent them. Or all of the above.

Searching for a methodology to guide the critical work of empowering individuals as innovators, I discovered The Five Characteristics of Successful Innovators by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic. Chamorro-Premuzic explains that when it comes to innovation, “Creativity alone, however, is not sufficient for innovation: innovation also requires the development, production, and implementation of an idea.” Innovation requires execution.

The article details five characteristics of “entrepreneurial people, that is, individuals who are a driving force of innovation, irrespective of whether they are self-employed, business founders, or employees.” I offer Chamorro-Premuzic’s ideas as a powerful tool for guiding my work with individuals and institutions, and for creating a common framework for everyone and every organization working on the future of distribution:

1. An opportunistic mindset that helps them identify gaps in the market. Opportunities are at the heart of entrepreneurship and innovation, and some people are much more alert to them than others. In addition, opportunists are genetically pre-wired for novelty: they crave new and complex experiences and seek variety in all aspects of life. This is consistent with the higher rates of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder among business founders.

2. Formal education or training, which are essential for noticing new opportunities or interpreting events as promising opportunities. Contrary to popular belief, most successful innovators are not dropout geniuses, but well-trained experts in their field. Without expertise, it is hard to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant information; between noise and signals. This is consistent with research showing that entrepreneurship training does pay off.

3. Proactivity and a high degree of persistence, which enable them to exploit the opportunities they identify. Above all, they [sic] effective innovators are more driven, resilient, and energetic than their counterparts.

4. A healthy dose of prudence. Contrary to what many people think, successful innovators are more organized, cautious, and risk-averse than the general population. (Although higher risk-taking is linked to business formation, it is not actually linked to business success).

5. Social capital, which they rely on throughout the entrepreneurial process. Serial innovators tend to use their connections and networks to mobilize resources and build strong alliances, both internally and externally. Popular accounts of entrepreneurship tend to glorify innovators as independent spirits and individualistic geniuses, but innovation is always the product of teams. In line, entrepreneurial people tend to have higher [emotional intelligence] which enables them to sell their ideas and strategy to others, and communicate the core mission to the team.

Foresight and footsteps

As I launch my year-long “conversation about the future of distribution,” I am searching for distribution’s innovators and will leverage Chamorro-Premuzic’s five characteristics to better tell their stories. I’ll share their mission, vision and ideas, putting them out for all that will listen, as essential work supported by yet another critical observation in his article:

Even when people possess these five characteristics, true innovation is unlikely to occur in the absence of a meaningful mission or clear long-term vision. In short, there is no point in just hoping for a breakthrough idea—what matters is the ability to generate many ideas, discover the right opportunities to develop them, and act with drive and dedication to achieve a meaningful goal. Ideas don’t make people successful—it’s the other way around. [Emphasis added.]

I need your help. Please share your experiences below. And if you can point me in the direction of anyone innovating distribution, please reach me at mark.dancer@n4bi.com.