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Five Traits That Shape the Entrepreneurial Mindset

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”  — George Bernard Shaw

In today’s fast-changing world, where AI is not only automating tasks but also reshaping entire industries, innovation has become a necessity. Yet innovation doesn’t emerge from processes alone. It emerges from people. More specifically, it emerges from people who consistently challenge the status quo, spot unseen opportunities, and act boldly to create something new. These are the people who exhibit the entrepreneurial mindset.

Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to start a company to be entrepreneurial. Within every team, product group, and division of an organization, there are individuals who think like entrepreneurs. They act like internal catalysts — pushing boundaries, taking initiative, and turning ideas into reality. But what exactly distinguishes them? What traits give rise to this mindset?

In this article we look at five specific traits that map closely to the entrepreneurial mindset and fuel innovation, especially in uncertain environments. As AI continues to blur the boundaries between human and machine capabilities, hiring creative and entrepreneurial people creates the differentiating factor for companies.

Openness to Experience: Seeing Possibilities Others Miss

Openness to experience, one of the Big Five personality traits, describes a person’s receptivity to new ideas, perspectives, and experiences. People high in this trait tend to be imaginative, curious, and comfortable with ambiguity.

This openness is a key driver of innovation. It enables individuals to see beyond the obvious, connect dots across disparate domains, and entertain possibilities that others dismiss. A meta-analysis found openness to be one of the strongest personality predictors of entrepreneurial intentions and success. In essence, openness expands your aperture. It increases the range of what you consider possible.

In the workplace, these are the team members who explore emerging technologies, ask “what if?” questions, and propose ideas that seem unconventional at first. They are more likely to perceive AI not as a threat, but as a canvas for experimentation. And in a world being rapidly redefined by AI, such openness is vital for reinventing products, services, and business models.

Proactive Personality: Acting Before the Opportunity Knocks

If openness helps you see opportunities, proactivity helps you act on them. Proactive individuals don’t wait for permission. They initiate change, seek out problems to solve, and constantly look for ways to improve systems around them.

In the context of entrepreneurship, proactivity has been strongly linked with opportunity recognition and business creation. A research study on college students showed that proactive individuals were significantly more likely to identify and pursue entrepreneurial opportunities. 

Within organizations, proactive employees are often the first to spot gaps, propose new initiatives, or pilot AI tools to automate repetitive tasks. They aren’t satisfied with maintaining the status quo. This mindset is especially critical now, as AI is transforming workflows and unlocking new capabilities. 

Willingness to Take (Social) Risks: Daring to Be Different

Risk-taking is often associated with entrepreneurship, but not all risk is created equal. In the workplace, one of the most important forms is social risk-taking: the willingness to propose a controversial idea, speak up against consensus, or pursue a project that might fail publicly.

Entrepreneurs tend to score higher in social risk-taking compared to non-entrepreneurs. Why? Because innovation requires deviation from the norm. It involves challenging established practices, questioning “how things are done,” and putting one’s reputation on the line for a new idea.

In traditional environments, this kind of risk-taking can be seen as troublemaking. But in innovative cultures, it’s a signal of leadership. Especially now, as companies grapple with how to responsibly and creatively integrate AI into their operations, those who are willing to push boundaries and test new approaches are essential. Without this trait, organizations default to caution, and in a fast-moving landscape, caution can become a liability.

Curiosity: The Engine of Discovery

Curiosity is the urge to explore, ask questions, and seek out new information. It’s a cognitive and emotional driver that powers learning and adaptability.

Recent studies have shown that curiosity is a strong predictor of entrepreneurial alertness — the ability to notice opportunities that others miss. Heinemann et al. found that epistemic curiosity (a desire for knowledge) was even more predictive of entrepreneurial outcomes than openness to experience. Curious individuals actively scan the horizon, connect ideas across domains, and pursue learning for its own sake.

In the age of AI, where the pace of technological change can be overwhelming, curiosity serves as an antidote to stagnation. Curious individuals experiment with new tools, explore how machine learning might apply to their field, and continually expand their mental models. 

Resilience: Turning Setbacks Into Fuel

Perhaps no trait is more essential to the entrepreneurial mindset than resilience. Innovation is a messy process. Failure is common. Ideas flop, tools break, people resist. The key is not avoiding failure but rebounding from it.

Resilience is the capacity to absorb stress, recover from setbacks, and maintain focus on long-term goals. Research shows that the three dimensions of resilience (hardiness, resourcefulness and optimism) help to predict entrepreneurial success, with resourcefulness being the most salient. 

This mindset is particularly relevant in a volatile AI-driven environment. As new tools replace old workflows and value chains shift, many teams will face ambiguity, reorganization, and failed experiments. Resilient individuals are more likely to adapt, find new paths, and view challenges as temporary detours rather than dead ends. They persist not because success is guaranteed, but because they believe it’s possible.

Why These Traits Matter More Now Than Ever

These traits — openness, proactivity, risk tolerance, curiosity, and resilience — have long been associated with entrepreneurs. But today, they are no longer limited to founders. In a landscape being redefined by artificial intelligence, every individual contributor and team leader needs to tap into this entrepreneurial mindset.

Why?

Because AI is not just another tool. It’s a fundamental shift in how work gets done. Roles are changing, hierarchies are flattening, and traditional competitive advantages are being eroded. In this new environment, those who can recognize change early, adapt quickly, and innovate boldly will define the future of work.

And here’s the good news: these traits are not fixed. While some people may naturally exhibit them, organizations can cultivate them through intentional design. Encouraging experimentation, rewarding initiative, providing psychological safety, and investing in learning are just a few ways to nurture the entrepreneurial spirit within teams.

As the workplace continues to evolve, the most valuable employees won’t just be the most skilled or the most efficient. They’ll be the most entrepreneurial — the ones with the vision to imagine what’s possible, the courage to pursue it, and the resilience to see it through.

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How Generative AI is Reshaping the Future of Tech Work

Every disruptive tool in the history of technology has reshaped not just what we work on, but how we work. The advent of cloud computing didn’t just speed up software delivery—it transformed the entire product mindset. Companies moved from slow, waterfall models to agile, continuous delivery of services. Speed, iteration, and customer responsiveness became the new north stars.

Today, generative AI is prompting a similar reckoning. Its ability to produce code, content, and prototypes at lightning speed forces us to ask: What does meaningful work look like in an era where execution is cheap and near-instant? How do we organize for innovation when the tools themselves are evolving daily?

To answer these questions, we need to rethink how teams are built, how cultures are shaped, and how success is measured. The future of work is more about reconfiguring human work for a landscape where ideation, experimentation, and adaptability are the new competitive advantages, than simply automating tasks.

To navigate this next frontier, we need to understand the major trends reshaping the future of work in technology.

Trends

The Cost of Execution is Plummeting

Just a few years ago, building a minimum viable product (MVP) required a team of developers, designers, and weeks (if not months) of effort. Today, a capable generalist with access to tools like GitHub Copilot can spin up a working prototype in hours.

This shift is quantifiable. GitHub’s 2024 productivity report showed developers using AI coding tools completed tasks 55% faster, with higher focus and reduced mental fatigue. MIT and Microsoft researchers found similar results: a 56% speed increase when software engineers used AI as a pair programmer.

But as execution becomes commoditized, it ceases to be a differentiator. What matters now is what you build, why it matters, and how quickly you can learn from real users. Competitive advantage is shifting from efficiency to experimentation and product-market fit.

In short: in a world where everyone can build fast, those who explore better will win.

We’re Still in Exploration Mode

Despite the excitement, generative AI is still far from plug-and-play. Integrating these tools into real-world business workflows is messy, expensive, and often unreliable. And while AI is great at generating content or code, it’s still brittle when it comes to reasoning, context, or strategy.

The so-called “killer apps” of generative AI—the ones that will reshape entire industries—haven’t yet arrived. According to McKinsey’s 2024 report on GenAI, only about 10% of organizations report significant value from GenAI, and many pilots are failing to scale due to unclear ROI and integration challenges.

This places us squarely in the exploration phase of innovation. It’s tempting to force AI into existing processes, expecting predictable outputs. But the real opportunity lies in experimenting, probing new use cases, and embracing ambiguity.

Exploration is no longer “a nice to have”. It’s become essential. And organizations must build the capacity to explore without immediate payoff if they want to discover the next big thing.

Pressure to Innovate is Rising

All of this is happening against a backdrop of increased volatility: shifting customer expectations, economic uncertainty, and rapid technology cycles. Leaders are feeling the squeeze—needing to innovate faster while also managing risk.

But here’s the paradox: too much pressure can kill innovation. Research from Teresa Amabile has shown that high-pressure environments oriented around extrinsic rewards tend to suppress creativity. People become more risk-averse, less exploratory, and more focused on pleasing stakeholders than experimenting with new ideas.

To survive and thrive, tech companies must shift their mindset from optimization to experimentation, from managing work to designing conditions for innovation.

This leads us to the second core pillar of the future of work: how we organize and empower people in order to harness collaborative Intelligence. 

Building Blocks of Collaborative Intelligence

The old myth of the lone genius persists in tech but it’s increasingly out of step with today’s reality. Today’s problems like ethical AI, climate tech, platform trust are inherently complex. Solving them requires multiple perspectives, disciplines, and heuristics. No single individual, no matter how brilliant, can fully grasp the nuance alone.

Scott Page’s research on cognitive diversity shows that heterogeneous teams consistently outperform homogeneous ones when tackling non-routine, complex tasks. Diverse thinkers bring different models, biases, and blind spots which, when managed well, leads to better problem-solving.

But this collaborative intelligence doesn’t happen by accident. It requires the right mix of people, culture, and incentives. Let’s break that down.

People

In this new world, depth of expertise isn’t enough. What’s needed are T-shaped individuals—people who possess deep expertise in a specific area (the vertical bar of the “T”), but also broad skills and curiosity that allow them to collaborate across domains (the horizontal bar).

These individuals are connectors, translators, and creative synthesizers. They’re engineers who understand user research, product managers who code, designers who analyze data. They can shift gears from deep work to cross-functional problem-solving with ease.

IDEO, which helped popularize the concept, found T-shaped people to be central to high-performing innovation teams. And organizational research confirms this: T-shaped professionals are more adaptable, more comfortable with ambiguity, and better at generating creative solutions in multidisciplinary settings.

Hiring for T-shaped talent builds not just execution capacity, but also resilience and adaptability.

Culture

Culture is the invisible force that either enables or crushes innovation. Yet many companies cling to outdated models of top-down hierarchies, rigid approval systems, and fear-based management.

To foster exploration, cultures must be reengineered around the principles of Self-Determination Theory (SDT), developed by psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan. According to SDT, people are most intrinsically motivated, and therefore most engaged and creative, when three core psychological needs are met:

  • Autonomy: The feeling that one can direct their own work and make meaningful choices.
  • Competence: The sense of being capable and growing in one’s abilities.
  • Relatedness: Feeling connected to others and contributing to something larger..

A culture rooted in SDT doesn’t just produce happier employees. It produces better ideas.

Incentives

Traditional incentive structures—performance bonuses, individual KPIs, stack rankings—are optimized for predictability and efficiency. They reward execution, not experimentation.

But as research from both Deci & Ryan and Amabile shows, extrinsic rewards often undermine intrinsic motivation, particularly for creative work. When people work only for outcomes, they become risk-averse. They choose the safe path, not the inventive one.

To build a future-ready organization, leaders must rethink what they reward:

  • Celebrate collaboration, not just individual brilliance.
  • Reward learning, even when projects fail.
  • Make space for intrinsic goals, like mastery, curiosity, and purpose.

Shifting incentives in this way doesn’t mean abandoning accountability—it means realigning it with innovation.

Final Thoughts

AI is shifting our focus from how we execute to how we explore, learn, and adapt. In this new landscape, competitive advantage will belong, not to those who can scale fastest, but to those who can reimagine the way teams think, build, and evolve together.

This requires more than new tech—it requires reconfiguring the foundations of work.

In the next part of this blog, we’ll explore how to redesign teams for this future. The future of work is not a question of whether we change, but how intentionally we do so. 

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Leading When You Don’t Know: The Power of Negative Capability 

When New Zealand faced the first wave of COVID-19, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern didn’t rush to over-promise or posture certainty. Instead, she leaned into transparency, regularly updating citizens with what was known—and, critically, what wasn’t. Her leadership was marked not by decisive bravado, but by a calm willingness to wait, listen, and act when the path became clearer.

This isn’t just a story of pandemic response. It’s an example of leadership at the edge—where accumulated knowledge and traditional decision-making frameworks fall short. In such moments, what matters is not just what a leader knows, but their ability to hold space for not knowing.

This is where the concept of Negative Capability becomes both urgent and transformative.

What Is Negative Capability?

First coined by Romantic poet John Keats, Negative Capability describes the capacity to remain “in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” While Keats was reflecting on literary genius, modern scholars and leadership theorists have found in his words a valuable metaphor for navigating complexity and uncertainty.

In leadership, Negative Capability refers to the ability to tolerate ambiguity, suspend judgment, and resist the impulse to impose premature certainty—especially when the stakes are high and the path forward unclear. It is a form of reflective inaction—the deliberate choice to pause, absorb, and wait for the right insight, rather than react defensively or default to what has worked before.

Why Leaders Struggle with Negative Capability

Leadership, especially in Western corporate culture, is often measured by decisiveness, clarity, and confidence. The leader is expected to know, to act, and to inspire trust through their ability to lead from the front. Traditional leadership development prioritizes “positive capabilities”—attributes like visioning, planning, and execution. These are vital in stable environments.

But what happens when the environment is not stable? When the actors are unfamiliar, the rules have changed, and the old playbook no longer applies?

In today’s VUCA world—marked by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity—leadership often unfolds in “radical uncertainty.” Here, the demand to act collides with the reality that we simply don’t yet know the right strategy. Leaders face a paradox: the very qualities that earned them their positions—experience, expertise, confidence—can become liabilities when they prevent them from not acting long enough to sense what is really needed.

The Costs of Premature Action

Consider a common scenario: a tech company begins to lose market share to a disruptive competitor. The board demands a turnaround strategy. The CEO, feeling the weight of expectation, announces a reorganization, lays off staff, and pivots the product line. Six months later, nothing has improved. Why?

Because the leader responded with positive capability—decisive action—before taking the time to understand the deeper dynamics at play: shifting customer expectations, employee morale, and the subtleties of emerging technology trends.

In contrast, a leader drawing on Negative Capability would have paused to reflect more deeply. They might have resisted the urge to act immediately, choosing instead to convene diverse voices, sense the complexity of the situation, and consider new possibilities. This is not indecision—it’s discipline.

Negative Capability in Action: Practical Strategies for Leaders

So how can leaders cultivate Negative Capability? Here are a few grounded strategies:

1. Practice the “Pause”

Create structured pauses in your decision-making process. Before responding to a crisis or making a strategic pivot, ask yourself: What if I waited just a little longer? Create a discipline of pausing, not just for analysis, but for reflection—cognitively and emotionally.

“Don’t just do something, stand there.” — White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland

2. Adopt a Meta-Perspective

When immersed in a high-stakes situation, practice the “balcony view” — observe yourself and the system neutrally, like looking down from above. What patterns emerge? Who’s reacting from fear or habit? What isn’t being said? This neutral observation disrupts automatic responses and allows for deeper insight.

3. Create Containers for Not-Knowing

Establish spaces—retreats, strategy offsites, or peer dialogue groups—where not knowing is acceptable. Frame these sessions as opportunities to explore complexity rather than solve problems. Psychological safety is key here; people must feel free to admit uncertainty without fear of appearing weak.

4. Normalize Ambiguity in Leadership Culture

Shift your team’s expectations. Instead of always seeking “quick wins,” model tolerance for ambiguity. Share your own moments of uncertainty and how you worked through them. This humanizes leadership and builds collective resilience.

5. Balance Positive and Negative Capabilities

Negative Capability is not the absence of action—it is the capacity to wait until the right action reveals itself. Leadership is often about knowing when to hold back, and when to move decisively. Mastery lies in balancing these twin forces.

Final Thoughts: Leading into the Unknown

We live in an era where no amount of experience can guarantee the right answer, and where the illusion of control is constantly being shattered by unpredictable change. In such times, perhaps the most courageous act of leadership is not to speak, but to listen. Not to act, but to reflect. Not to know, but to stay with the not-knowing.

Negative Capability is not a replacement for action-oriented leadership—it’s the precondition for wise action in uncertain times. It invites us to become more attuned to the present moment, more accepting of ambiguity, and more open to emergence.

Because sometimes, the answer doesn’t come from what you do next. It comes from what you don’t do yet.

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Cooperation vs. Competition: Resolving Workplace Conflict

Imagine a common workplace hurdle:  two colleagues—Alex from Sales and Priya from Marketing—are jointly preparing a spreadsheet for an upcoming quarterly business review. Late one evening, Alex revises the structure of the spreadsheet, reorders the data, and adds projections. The next morning, Priya logs in and discovers her inputs have been moved or removed. She feels her contributions have been disregarded. Alex believes he improved the document for clarity.

What starts as a simple task quickly spirals into conflict. Communication becomes strained. Collaboration deteriorates. This type of conflict is not uncommon—but how it unfolds depends significantly on the perceived nature of the relationship between the parties involved.

This scenario serves as a practical illustration of psychologist Morton Deutsch’s influential theory of cooperation and competition, a foundational framework in the field of conflict resolution.

Deutsch’s Theory of Cooperation and Competition

In the 1940s, psychologist Morton Deutsch developed a powerful framework for understanding conflict, centered on the crucial concept of interdependence—how our goals are linked to others. According to Deutsch, the way individuals perceive the relationship between their goals determines whether conflict is approached cooperatively or competitively.

He identified two types of interdependence:

  • Positive: Goals of two people are linked in such a way that the probability of one person’s success in achieving the goal is positively correlated to the attainment of the other person’s goal. In other words, the two people sink or swim together. 
  • Negative: In a negative linkage, if one person wins the other loses. 

These perceptions shape the actions individuals take in conflict situations. Actions can be effective (improving the chances of reaching a goal) or bungling (ineffective or even detrimental, worsening those chances). 

When interdependence and actions interact, they give rise to three important relational dynamics that shape the tone and trajectory of conflict:

  1. Mutual Support (Substitutability): How much one person’s actions help or hinder another. In essence, are you working together or against each other? In a cooperative setting, effective actions by team members support each other as they contribute to a shared outcome. In a competitive setting, a bungling action by one might be helpful to the opponent as they look better in comparison. In the spreadsheet example, if Alex’s late-night edits were useful and if Priya perceived the situation as cooperative, she would see the changes as supportive. 
  2. Openness to Influence (Inducibility): This is the willingness of individuals to listen to and be influenced by one another. When people view each other as partners, they are more likely to adapt their ideas and consider alternative perspectives. In contrast, competitive dynamics create defensiveness and resistance to input. In the spreadsheet conflict, if Priya and Alex trust each other’s intentions, they’ll likely integrate feedback and co-create a better result. If they view each other as rivals, they’ll resist collaboration and retreat to siloed efforts.
  3. Attitudes and Emotions: These are the feelings and judgments people hold about each other—such as trust, respect, suspicion, or resentment. Positive interdependence fosters goodwill, patience, and empathy. Negative interdependence breeds anxiety, frustration, and hostility. Over time, these emotional patterns solidify and influence the workplace culture as a whole.

These dynamics—mutual support, openness to influence, and the feelings between team members—are constantly shifting. They’re deeply influenced by how individuals view their interdependence and the actions they take. Deutsch’s research clearly showed that when people are skilled and their actions are effective, a cooperative approach consistently leads to stronger relationships, greater trust, and ultimately, better outcomes than a competitive one.  

Cooperation vs. Competition in Action

Returning to the example of the spreadsheet, let us consider two potential outcomes—one cooperative, one competitive:

Cooperative Resolution: Alex and Priya, guided by a shared understanding of their mutual goal (a successful business review), approach the situation with curiosity. Priya calmly voiced her concerns, and Alex explained his rationale. They agree to jointly review the document and integrate both sets of inputs. Their actions are effective, attitudes remain positive, and each is open to being influenced by the other’s suggestions. Substitutability is high—they both contribute to the same goal—and the relationship is strengthened. In addition, they set new norms on how to make changes to each others’ sections so as not to create confusion. 

Competitive Breakdown: Priya reacts defensively, assuming Alex is trying to take over the project. Alex feels unappreciated and digs in. Communication becomes guarded, and each begins working on their own version of the report. Substitutability disappears, attitudes harden, and inducibility vanishes. The final presentation is disjointed, and leadership notices the lack of cohesion. The competitive breakdown not only damaged the report but also left lingering resentment between Alex and Priya, impacting future collaborations.

These contrasting outcomes underscore the value of Deutsch’s insights: conflict is not inherently destructive. The determining factor lies in how individuals interpret their interdependence and choose to act.

Strategies for Leaders

Leaders have a critical role to play in shaping the environment that determines whether conflicts become constructive or destructive. Below are three evidence-based strategies drawn from Deutsch’s theory:

1. Reframe Conflicts to Highlight Positive Interdependence Help team members view their goals as interconnected rather than opposed. Facilitate discussions that highlight how each team member’s contribution is essential. In the spreadsheet example, a manager could emphasize that both Sales and Marketing bring vital perspectives to the business review and that their input is complementary.

2. Design Incentives to Reinforce Cooperation Audit reward structures to ensure they do not unintentionally foster competition. Avoid systems where individuals are pitted against one another for limited recognition or rewards. Instead, design performance metrics that reward collaborative outcomes, knowledge sharing, and collective success.

3. Establish Norms and Processes for Constructive Dialogue Promote group norms that encourage respectful disagreement, active listening, and open communication. Use structured meeting formats with clear roles and turn-taking to ensure all voices are heard. Leaders should model openness to influence and reinforce norms that make it safe to express dissent without fear of reprisal.

Conclusion

Morton Deutsch’s work offers a powerful lens through which to understand and transform workplace conflict. By implementing Deutsch’s principles, leaders can transform their workplaces into hubs of collaboration and innovation. In doing so, even the most routine workplace conflicts—like a disagreement over a spreadsheet—can become opportunities for greater trust, innovation, and shared achievement.

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Organizational Play: The Unexpected Path to Radical Innovation

In a captivating TED talk, author Steven Johnson illustrates how the invention of a seemingly simple flute by cavemen 40,000 years ago unexpectedly paved the way for the development of the modern computer. A series of inventions—music boxes, toy robots, and the like—initially perceived as mere amusements, laid the groundwork for innovations that would ultimately revolutionize entire industries. As he explains, “Necessity isn’t always the mother of invention. The playful state of mind is fundamentally exploratory, seeking out new possibilities in the world around us. And that seeking is why so many experiences that started with simple delight and amusement eventually led us to profound breakthroughs.”

Yet, the power of play as a catalyst for innovation is often overlooked in the corporate world. When most companies think about innovation, their first instinct is to lean heavily on market research, analyzing customer feedback, and refining processes to meet immediate needs. However, this approach often leads to incremental improvements rather than groundbreaking advancements.

The Rise of AI and the Need for Transformational Innovation

With the proliferation of generative AI in recent years, most companies are adopting AI in their workflows, leading to more efficient or more capable product offerings (barring current AI challenges like hallucinations). But the more transformational breakthroughs — the killer apps — remain elusive.

The challenge lies in the fact that most company structures and processes are geared toward incremental innovation. Trying to squeeze out transformational innovation from an organizational machinery fine-tuned for incrementalism is a difficult task. The very elements that enable transformative breakthroughs are often the exact opposite of what most companies are structured for.

The Unpredictability of Transformational Ideas

Transformational ideas are inherently difficult to predict, even by the people who might have worked on an earlier, related problem. When the Musa brothers in Baghdad made the first programmable music box, using interchangeable metal cylinders to encode music, they could not have predicted that their invention would later inspire the French inventor, Jacques de Vaucanson, to use the same mechanism to create programmable looms. This unexpected connection highlights the unpredictable nature of innovation.

In other words, companies that rely solely on predicting the next big thing will likely miss out on creating breakthrough ideas. Their existing processes, which often rely heavily on customer feedback and market research, can only lead to predictable improvements on existing products.

Solutions in Search of Problems

Many offbeat ideas are quickly shut down with questions like “What is the customer pain point?” or “This looks like a solution looking for a problem.” While this feedback is relevant when the goal is to evolve existing products, it can stifle radical innovation. Most radical ideas are actually the reverse – they are solutions looking for problems.

Consider the invention of the sticky note. Spencer Silver, a scientist at 3M, was working on making a super-strong adhesive but accidentally ended up creating a weak adhesive that could be peeled off easily and was reusable. He was intrigued by this new adhesive and spent several years giving seminars and talking to people within the company to find ways to commercialize it, but couldn’t find a good use. It wasn’t until another colleague, Art Fry, recognized the potential of the adhesive as a bookmark that the sticky note was born. This example illustrates the importance of recognizing the potential of solutions even before a clear problem has been identified.

Instead of relying solely on customer feedback, companies need to develop a different approach to evaluate solutions that don’t yet have a well-defined problem. One effective strategy is to focus on complexity. If a solution was non-trivial and involved overcoming significant challenges, it could be a good candidate for creating a future competitive advantage.

The Exploration vs. Exploitation Mindset

To thrive in their environments, most animals toggle between exploration and exploitation. Exploration, akin to play, empowers animals to uncover new possibilities and problem-solving approaches. Research suggests that animals engaging in more play are often better prepared to adapt to environmental challenges, boosting their survival and reproductive prospects.

However, when faced with threats, exploration can be risky. In such situations, we tend to resort to using our existing knowledge to solve the immediate problem. This natural tendency highlights the tension between exploration and exploitation.

This biological function of exploration—stepping away from immediate survival needs to tinker with novel ideas—closely aligns with what companies must do to thrive in an uncertain and competitive landscape. Play allows us to probe beyond the “local optima,” or safe solutions, to discover entirely new paradigms. 

However, the conditions under which successful exploration occurs are very different from the exploitation phase. Exploration works best when people feel safe and supported in their environment. A playful, low-stress environment is essential for serious play to thrive.

A New Path For Radical Innovation

Successfully balancing transformational and incremental innovation is a persistent challenge for organizations. While many companies excel at incremental innovation, they often struggle to cultivate an environment that fosters radical breakthroughs. Existing approaches, such as corporate hackathons or Google’s “20% time,” have often fallen short of their intended goals. These initiatives, while valuable in promoting experimentation, often fail to fully embrace the conditions necessary for deep exploration.

What if we could create a new model, an “innovation sabbatical” for radical innovation to thrive? Imagine an extended period, lasting 2-3 months each year, where employees get a a dedicated space for radical exploration, free from the daily demands of their regular work. This would act as an extended hackathon, but with a crucial difference: it would be designed to foster a distinct culture that prioritizes deep exploration. Within this sabbatical environment, traditional hierarchies would fade, replaced by an emphasis on collaboration and a playful, low-stress atmosphere. Evaluation would shift away from immediate business needs, focusing instead on the ingenuity and complexity of the ideas generated. 

The goal with an innovation sabbatical is not for companies to predict the next big idea but to create an additional pathway where transformational ideas get a chance to flourish by ensuring that resources, incentives and motivation are all aligned in the right way.