My father first got me interested in reading about innovation, although for me it was only a topic of study while he got to work with innovation daily in his job at Nela Park, a huge General Electric complex (Cleveland, Ohio). But he taught me to learn from my study of the famous inventors. Stories of innovators like these have shown me how some have changed the world from their workshop. These great historical figures have often provided me with inspiration to get past the hurdles I find on my own path.

My father loved his work because the ghosts of brilliant people with wild ideas were all around him. He ran an R&D facility called the “General Electric Lighting Institute,” and was GE’s official biographer for Thomas Edison, co-founder of the company. Dad was an Electrical Engineer and after dinner we’d go to his workbench for lessons on the fabrication of gadgets of one kind or another. This guy was a craftsman who could work with all kinds of tools, whether it be a soldering iron or a wood planer.

While I never became an engineer like him, I believe that my father taught me a set of skills that come directly from his own research into the mindset of inventive people. I began this month’s column with a biographical sketch because I think it’s important to know that while I have never been an innovator personally, being an executive recruiter working with brilliant people has taught me a great deal about the way they think. It turns out that being up in the stands looking down on the playing field can be an interesting place to write about this topic.

A couple of common threads across innovation

For decades now, I’ve been a hired gun—someone brought on board to identify and then recruit scientists or engineers who can make or break a small company. I’ve been in so many biotech company board rooms that I can read off portfolios of prospective new hires without even looking at my PowerPoint slides. But even while my professional career deals primarily with biology and engineering, the skills and unique personalities of the “players” aren’t much different than those of the innovators in wildly different industries. It turns out that there are common traits, leading to common experiences, across the careers of brilliant innovators despite the industry sector they come from.

That first and most important trait is Persistence. I remember how my father described this to me when I was about to give up on building an electronics kit on his garage workbench. I put this radio together on his bench top and evidently my soldering skills needed some work, because when I plugged it in all it did was smoke. So, Dad gave me my first “Edison story.” It inspired me, and I have also seen this same level of persistence in others whom I have placed into key scientific roles in companies. Let’s define what it means to have great perseverance.

When Edison developed the electric light bulb, he had to identify the right material to use for the filament, something that would produce light over-and-over again and yet be “scalable” so that bulbs could be manufactured. Edison and his lab members went through hundreds and later thousands of materials, natural or man-made, and most “glowed” when given a shot of electricity. But it took more than 2,500 attempts before the team found one that worked consistently. When later asked about his “failure” to find the right filament, he replied: “We didn’t fail. The light bulb was simply an invention with thousands of steps.” Let’s face it, people with persistence like Edison are capable of much more than the rest of us despite negative results or naysayers. That’s because they just don’t give up.

This same “staying power” was also a key part of the journey that the Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi took in developing radio. Prior to 1895, Marconi had been unable to get his transmissions to go further than 1/2 mile. His invention of radio transmission worked across his bedroom from one point to another without wires, but he couldn’t achieve long distances. It led other famous scientists to flatly state it was impossible. Highly respected British physicist, Sir Oliver Lodge, forecasted that radio waves were a curious phenomenon that had a “maximum range of one-half mile.” At that point, many people would have given up. The naysayer element has a great effect on stifling innovation. But Marconi kept at it.

Years before Marconi was even born, an American dentist by the name of Mahlon Loomis had almost claimed the big prize. He proposed a system of “aerial telegraphy” but despite a patent issued to him for what could have been the foundation of radio, he wasn’t able to generate funding or enough enthusiasm from the American government to see it through. Marconi’s Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company eventually brought commercial radio to the world because Marconi had the persistence to hang in there and take it to the next level.
Nothing gets an innovator further than persistence, fueled by passion and a vision of their future success.

Long-range vision

Speaking of “vision,” I’ll introduce another trait here which I would describe as the capability for seeing much further down the road than the rest of us. Perhaps you are old enough to remember the first days of biotechnology, when researchers began manipulating DNA. Just a few years into this biological revolution, one of the first scientists doing this work, Herbert Boyer, got a call from venture capitalist Robert Swanson. He was interested in talking about whether there might be any commercial value to this technology. They got together for a short meeting to discuss it, and hours later Swanson (then a partner at the firm Kleiner & Perkins) had convinced Boyer to start a company based on this technology. They each came up with $500. Of course, that company was Genentech, now a leader in many fields and with more than 13,000 employees. Boyer was the inventor, and yet Swanson was an innovator; these two and their long-range vision saw that DNA technologies could have useful, commercial results. They sure were right!

Another great piece of long-range vision came 100 years earlier, at the time that David Sarnoff worked for the Marconi Company. Sarnoff, later a legendary executive for RCA, was hired as a messenger boy but made his way up the Marconi ranks due to his tough, competitive approach. Sarnoff had incredible long-range vision. Marconi saw radio as just a larger version of what he had invented in his bedroom—communication between one person to another across distances. Instead, Sarnoff saw that it was a mass communication opportunity. Sarnoff was the one who had the vision to see that radio could become society’s first broadcast medium. And what an impact that had on the world!

Distinguishing between inventors and innovation

Even though I never personally became a scientist or an engineer, I still had the opportunity to incorporate both persistence and long-range vision into my thinking. I know that these traits have benefited me. Never think that just because you are not an inventor means that you’re not capable of innovation.

I’ve placed inventors into small companies that became large because of their technology. But, just as important to employers are those persons capable of innovating. For example, an engineer may not “invent” a bioprocess technology, but he or she may innovate a new way to use existing technologies in combination to greatly improve the output of the bioprocess. That’s just as important as something new, something invented.

The problem with pure “invention” is that sometimes inventors don’t forecast the real-world applications of their discovery. I’ve worked with many companies that had cool technology but where it just wasn’t practical, or where no one could develop a marketplace to pull it along. They got the patent but the technology just sits there. That’s why teams that have the inventor coupled with an engineer and a marketer will always win out. The engineer can innovate and adapt, and the marketer knows how to present it properly and create the “market pull” required to get traction.