What to expect: finders

 franklin
Ben Franklin

 NEW
 
Innovation
coverage
online

Innovator tours of museums in Paris

Tips for success in old age

Sol LeWitt,
 finder

Give Ralph Ellison a break

Greatest
women
artists

How Disney Imagineers innovate

Clint Eastwood, seeker
(Feb. 4)

The complex
 case of Fernando Botero
(Jan. 21 and 30)

Innovators
in academia
(Jan. 10)

Orson Welles and John Milton!
(Dec. 14)

Major League Baseball
as experimental innovator
 (Dec. 13)

Walt Disney
as finder
(Dec. 12)

Inventor Stanford Ovshinsky as aging finder
(Dec. 9)

Morris Louis
 as seeker
(Nov. 18)

 

Tips for conceptual innovators

If you’re a conceptual innovator, you need new challenges, new areas to explore, because staying put can be the same as getting stale.

Most of the commonly dispensed advice for would-be innovators is relevant to you, though not to experimental innovators. For example, aiming to strike a balance between self-discipline and “letting go” should help you, because you’re most likely to succeed through spontaneity. The same applies to making connections between disparate ideas, including “thinking outside the box.”

Youth is likely to be the time when achievements come most easily to you. So too, the early years when you embark on a new endeavor.

When you reach middle age, don’t worry if you find yourself in a mid-life crisis, because a mid-life shift could bring with it the potential for new breakthroughs in a new field. For mid-life role models, consider Benjamin Franklin, Walt Disney and David Hockney.

See also:
Why it matters

Tips for experimental innovators

 

Copyright © 2007 by Colin Stewart. All rights reserved.