#118—Bruce Vojak: Decoding the Minds of Serial Innovators

Bruce Vojak, is Managing Director of Breakthrough Innovation Advisors, LLC, and serves on the Advisory Board of Midtronics, Inc., JVA Partners, and the Board of Directors of Micron Industries Corporation, and is a Senior Fellow with The Conference Board.  Further, he has co-authored five book chapters—in addition to numerous peer-reviewed publications and conference presentations—on innovation. He is the author of No-Excuses Innovation: Strategies for Small- and Medium-Sized Mature Enterprises (published 2022) and Serial Innovators: How Individuals Create and Deliver Breakthrough Innovations in Mature Firms  from 2012.

Bruce was formerly the Dean and an Adjunct Professor in the top-ranked Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign. Earlier in his career, he was Director of Advanced Technology for Motorola’s non-semiconductor components business and was on the research staff at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. 

Bruce brings together real research with real-world practice, while taking a more human-view of innovation. Spanning a career at the intersection of business and technology, Bruce has experienced and explored innovation purposefully and variously.

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In this episode, Bruce shares: 

• The definition of innovation, how it relates to strategy 
• How successful innovators view organization politics and why this is important 
• The key characteristics of innovators seen from years of research, and what sets them apart from the rest 
• How innovators often see patterns others miss, and feel it is their "call of duty" to help an organization see and follow through on these ideas 
• What it takes to be a good manager of innovators—and how they can hold on to these innovators when not equipped to manage these unique individuals 

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Episode Timeline:
00:00—Highlight from today's episode
1:04—Introducing Bruce + the topic of today’s episode
2:57—If you really know me, you know that...
4:06—What's your definition of strategy?
7:13—What's your definition of innovation?
9:00— What sets serial innovators apart from others
14:12—What is a serial innovator, and the specific characteristics?
18:01—  Managing serial innovators effectively
19:35— Politics as part of the innovation process
21:02—  How serial innovators manage politics within an organization
22:30— Motivation for his "No Excuses-Innovation" book
24:40—  Book recommendation for strategists 
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Additional Resources:
Personal site: https://www.breakthrough-innovation-advisors.com/bruce-vojak/
Link to book: No-Excuses Innovation: Strategies for Small- and Medium-Sized Mature Enterprises
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bvojak/

Thank you to our guest. Thank you to our executive producer, Karina Reyes, our editor, Zach Ness, and the rest of the team. If you like

Thank you to our guest. Thank you to our executive producer, Karina Reyes, our editor, Zach Ness, and the rest of the team. If you like what you heard, please follow, download, and subscribe. I'm your host, Kaihan Krippendorff. Thank you for listening.

Follow us at outthinkernetworks.com/podcast

Transcript

Kaihan Krippendorff: Bruce, it is great to finally have you on the podcast. I have been a long time follower of your work from serial innovators which inspired me to write 1 of my books, and it's great to finally have you in person. Great. I wanna open up with the same 2 questions that I always begin with. The first is just to get us to know you a little bit more personally.
 
 If you could complete the sentence for me. If you really know me, you know that.
 
 Bruce Vojak: Okay. Great. I, you know, I have a what I would call a relatively eclectic set of interests and also infected set of friends. I've been kind of inclined to the life of the mind, so I tend to probably think more of an act on some page.
 
 But I've also experienced my professional life in a weird little ensemble play. I can illustrate several ways. I've got close friends, 2 or Theologians, won a successful commercial real veteran. The fourth is PhD in physics for instance. It was been a serial innovator himself.
 
 So I tend to just enjoy just being with different people of all backgrounds, and I just find it all fascinating.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: So do you for get together and converse together? I'll simultaneously
 
 Bruce Vojak: Well, actually, the 2 of the emojis that I sometimes do, but they
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: the others don't even know any of these
 
 Bruce Vojak: are just people that are, you know, kind of after a lifetime of of getting to know people, what are the ones that have probably stuck the longest with
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: me if you want? Okay. Great. I wanna go to the next question. In your case, I've asked 2 different questions.
 
 The first is what's your definition strategy, and the next is what's your definition of innovation. So let's start with what's your definition of strategy?
 
 Bruce Vojak: I'll give you parallel definitions for these 2. And when I look at strategy, I think of it in terms of beginning with the body of observations. Kind of some you might call it data. You might call it even informal data, but it's some body of observations that exhibit some kind of coherence or pattern or regularities. And then the active strategy in my understanding really involves simulating these and creating competitive advantages.
 
 But reading them in a very natural way. So it's really kind of almost like a stall looking for those patterns that are out They're looking for ways 1 might be able to exploit those. And I believe that a that an understanding like this really is what should be applied at least first, not other concepts that are great in themselves, things like blue ocean strategy, a great concept, but that, they're the authors have already, if you will, seen observations or made observations, seen some coherence of regularities. And process them. And I think that it's really incumbent on the strategist to be able to look for those patterns for themselves.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Interesting. I'm gonna play back what I sort of got out of your definition and just see if I'm where I'm off or not. There's this seeing the big picture by putting the pieces together in different ways or things that don't seem to go together. And then it sounds like the capability to create your own framework or create your own Blue Ocean as 1 example of a framework. Is am I am I on track?
 
 Bruce Vojak: Yeah. I think that's a good way to say it. I and let me take a step back, and maybe I can dig a little bit deeper on that. And, you know, I'm only using blue ocean strategy as an example. You know, concepts like that really do have their value.
 
 And I've used this argument in innovation. I've used it when it comes to things like base gate processes. A concept like that is good because it kind of instructs the noobie, the neophy, and it gives them something kinda hang on to and look at and it also reminds the people who are expert that might forget certain things. But the people who are really strategic in their thinking aren't going to necessarily rise and fall just on accounts above that. And it's it may be considered by some as a tool I would say that it is, but I would also go further to say that the best strategists and then it will get you I gather a few moments.
 
 The best innovators see patterns on the row, and that's really when, I'd say, the exciting things.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Yes. Got it. Yeah. Perfect. Yeah.
 
 That makes a lot of sense. I have gotten to know Renee Malvern a bit, and I would say she agrees that, you know, Blue Ocean is an important concept. But so is disruption and so is first mover in all of these. You know? Yeah.
 
 Bruce Vojak: And I could use that as a Right. Right. Right. And just want to integrate any of these things, but it's just the old scrape that In fact, people like that actually do the work of finding those patents for a while.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Right? Do the work. Yeah. And hand them to us to use let's talk about innovation, then what is your definition of innovation?
 
 Bruce Vojak: Yeah. Up until recently, I viewed and I still view it this way that innovation is not just creativity, obviously, that is bringing new products, new processes, new services, new business models, to the marketplace in a way where they're valued by the marketplace. And in the best case, I should add, that's the innovation is changing the basis of competition because that's really where you get the most competitive advantage. But more recently, I've been redefining in my own thinking innovation much more parallel to what I said about strategy and that innovation begins again when the person who is the innovator or has the potential to be 1 is kind of confronted with this body of observations. And there's some coherence in those observations, some patterns and regularities.
 
 And the best innovators, they begin to make sense of those. They assimilate those regularities. They create competitive advantages. They exploit them in a very natural way, and so they're not merely looking at customers, although, you know, things like design thinking is a a great concept. We're not just looking at processes.
 
 And, you know, again, I think Lean 6 Sigma, you know, it's great concept. They're not just trying to move the organization forward, but they're doing all these things at once. And they have the discernment and insight when they see these patterns to be able to make those judgments and move the organization forward. So it's a more, I'd say, generic or holistic understanding of what innovation is. And, again, it's to me, it's meant to compliment things like face gate and lean innovation and voice of the customer. Are all Yes. You know, again, good concepts, but those, to me, are are born out of observations of the type I'm talking.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Yes. That's what I love about your work. There are certain natural paradigms from which people look at innovation, for example, from starting with the lens of the product or looking at the process and the funnel. And you and my view really take this human centered or people centered view. You often use this phrase in the end.
 
 It's always about the people. What does that mean?
 
 Bruce Vojak: Yeah. You know, I'd like to illustrate this with the with the story, and it's got actually 2 parts to it. The first part, while I was working on the serial innovator project with Abby Griffin and Ray Price, I really continued to look at the question that got me involved in in the research in the beep in the first place. And it's a question that's kind of Huddl me since I was in graduate school, and that's how do the most impactful innovators know what to do. I've had a really the good fortune of working side by side with some remarkable people.
 
 I think I was a very good engineer, but not if you will, at the innovative impact that a lot of these other people have. I've always wondered how do they see this. And throughout our research, actually, we would hear people talk about connecting the dots, and I see these fuzzy dots. And so they would talk this way. And I would always think in my mind, yeah, yeah, fuzzy dots.
 
 Connect the dots. I would think in terms of, like, constellations in the sky that you'd see the dots and then you draw lines to connect them or the or the Trolin's books that we just have a set of dots that were numbered than you would than I thought. And I would say, yeah. It's a pattern deck of dots. That's right.
 
 And that's all good. But at the time that I was working on the serial innovator project, it happened for entirely other reasons to be reading a book on epistemology, which is the philosophy of knowledge, what we know and how we unbeknownst to know. And I came in the middle of this book, I came across an illustration that is remarkable. And it was actually it's a book called longing to know by Esther Mee. I wanna make sure to get her credit for this.
 
 But She talked about how the act of knowing or the act of discovery is a lot like viewing the magic eyes in it. And if you've seen these children's books where there's kind of a a page or all sorts of dots and colors. And if you look at it just right, if your eyes are not focused on the sheet, but focused beyond. Suddenly, you no longer see the 2 dimensional elements, but in your mind's eye, you see this three-dimensional pattern. And it was it just hit me.
 
 It just hit me that I realized that this was this was a much better illustration or metaphor for how these innovators come to see things that it's not merely seeing dots, 2 dimensional dots, and 3 dimensional phase, 2 dimensional lines. They see something richer and deeper And, you know, unless you're looking for this, unless you're, again, with these Magic Eyes books, unless you're looking for it, unless you know to look for it, you'd miss it. And so, you know, after I had that insight, I thought, okay. I'm gonna go back to some of the people that we had met with. And I'm gonna ask them just to tell me how do they know what to do.
 
 I was a little more explicit than our research, and it turned out that 1 of the innovators happened to be visiting campus at that time. And she and I were having once, and I posed the question. And without looking up for her meal, she said, I see dead people. Now I don't know if you've seen if you probably have seen the movie these days.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Yes. Yes. I Yeah.
 
 Bruce Vojak: At that time, I had not. And let's just say that I was taken aback a bit, and I'm kinda thinking to myself, who is the woman, and I knew her very well. So this is not like but it was kind of this this sense of, you know, what is she talking about? I see dev people. And you know, that conversation opened the door that first part of the conversation opened the door to a to me a very remarkable discussion about how she would, early in her career, see patterns that other people either didn't see or should see them before them.
 
 And she had to kinda develop through that time frame to accept and realize that, yes, she really was seeing things that other people weren't seeing. And I I'm not sure to make it Good people. I mean, we'll use it as the metaphor, but she was seeing patterns, and she was right much more often than not. And so she had to develop, like, both the confidence in that. And then also accept the responsibility.
 
 This idea that we talked about in the serial innovators book of crossing the bridge accepting the responsibility that when she saw things like that, whether it was in the marketplace, whether it was in the organization, that she had the responsibility to the organization to lead them through because
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: they don't necessarily see the dead people.
 
 Bruce Vojak: That's right.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: That's right. Got it.
 
 Bruce Vojak: And I jokingly tell people that an innovation you have to be it's kind of, like, running away from a barrier just have to be faster than that. You just have to see the patterns, you know, a little bit quicker, and I'm not heavily into the idea of, you know, you have to always be moving rapidly. It just has to be better. Mhmm. And it's the same thing with forecasting weather, and I think, especially forecasting weather, because it's a complex mathematically chaotic system, I think there's a lot of parallel
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: to a So then then then let's pull on that a little bit more and let's look at this serial innovator. And first, I'd like you to tell us what a serial innovator is because I haven't yet asked you to define that. And then the question will be, what are the characteristics of the serial innovator? Because we often think of innovators as looking like, you know, like Steve Jobs or, you know, wearing a hoodie or Mark Zuckerberg or something as you're wearing a or you're wearing a college AAAAAAAAA turtle neck like you. So for what what is a serial innovator and who are they?
 
 Bruce Vojak: You know, the initial study began of looking at people who were in the large mature companies. And in fact, I'd say that really all of my work with people in mature companies and, essentially, mature industries. So, you know, I've not done research with people. You know, as you've mentioned, I have done research about Apple or Amazon or the like. But I have looked at companies that have been around for a while and sell products I'd say we're probably considered technology enabled more than technology based.
 
 And, again, as a little bit more background, for a moment, I began looking at what I call technical visionaries because that again, I was trying to answer this question of how do these people know what to do? How do the visionaries know what to do? And I ran into reprice on campus. I shared it with him. He had had some experience asking similar questions.
 
 We started to collaborate It has aside a story that we don't tell often, but Ray and Ray and I actually met Abby Griffin, who was about a mile away from us. Through someone at the National Science Foundation in Washington. You didn't even know she was working on something equivalent market visionaries. And so with that as a background, we're looking at what I call technical visionaries. She's looking at market visionaries.
 
 When we started to collaborate, we realized that there were these people out there, and they enlarge with your companies that that would repeatedly create and deliver breakthrough innovations. And it was not a fluke. It wasn't just a 1 time thing. In fact, when we were talking to somebody at 1 company, she shared you know, we always knew we had like this. We didn't know anybody else did.
 
 And so there were this pattern, again, going back to what I'd been talking about before. This is pattern of people who are out there that really can have, you know, significant, you know, billion dollar impact on multibillion dollar companies. And as I subsequently saw over time, these people also exist in in market companies too who are sort of success. That's your
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: that's your your second book.
 
 Bruce Vojak: The second work that I did. Yeah. Now getting back to what do these people look like, kind of a handy way that we use to describe them as how they engage with problems. They're very rare systems thinkers. How they engage with projects.
 
 They're appropriately tenacious. They don't always they're not stubborn, but they carry things through to a logical point. They engage appropriately with business for technical people in particular, it's important to say in a large company that they realize the business, is there a great value? And remarkably, there's still some who missed that. And they value people.
 
 They are ones who quickly bring along the right team, and we probably don't have time to discuss this in-depth now, but They don't necessarily work with a preformed team, but they bring the people onto the project, yeah, that are necessary to solve the problem. And so they kind of have these characteristics. They also really care about navigating the organization because they realize that's probably as bigger problem as coming up with a good idea. And then the other thing that I'll just mention is that we also love to be to manage them. And how important it is to have a manager who or executive that I'd say appropriately supports them.
 
 Okay.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: What does that mean appropriately supporting? That that's yeah. Very curious about that. What does it take to be a good manager of serial innovators?
 
 Bruce Vojak: Very often, we found the innovator and their direct manager working together for many years, and it's it meant that they had very much a relational lot of transactional engagements necessarily. And very often, the manager had to understand it just how light or firm a touch to interact with these people, what that would look like. And so the ones who tried to micromanage would tend to fail the ones who really didn't provide any support would tend to fail. The best ones, it really was this relationship where they understood that the serial innovator because of their unique still set that that person was someone who would be able to drive value in the organization much more than they would as an executive or manager. And so they realized, you know, we're talking about serve of leaders.
 
 I mean, this is this challenges that concept of serve of leadership to the point where they do have to in a way submerge their own ego because they realize that for the best of everybody, they're getting resources for this person. Doesn't mean they don't challenge them. Doesn't mean that everybody's let to run wild. Right? But it really means that they're there to help make things half
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: of Yeah. See, I'm hearing a very different relationship between manager and managed as opposed to This is my successor. This is the person who's learning to do what I have already done and that eventually will take my role. This is much more like a manager, like a like a talent manager who's never gonna be the star themselves. Yeah.
 
 That's fascinating. Now 1 1 phrase that I pull for your book and I use it if anyone sort 1 of my speeches, I use it in every speech. They viewed up the political challenge a part of the problem solving process. Something like that, you said. You talked to us about that.
 
 Bruce Vojak: Yeah. You know, it's interesting because they they not only passively accept the challenge, but they realize that if they want to serve customer needs, we're gonna have to navigate the organization. And so they realize that it's not just coming up with an idea and throwing it to someone. I've seen a lot of quite honestly frustrated and bitter people who had had throughout their careers come up with some really good ideas, but never very been through. The people were most successful, you know, assumed that responsibility.
 
 And we kinda metaphorically refer to it as crossing the bridge. That they cross this bridge of accepting that personal responsibility. And it's what makes them rare. Right? I'll add quickly that when you look at all these characteristics that I've spoken about earlier plus this, it really is the whole set.
 
 You can't necessarily succeed without that at times errors can make things happen, whether it's 2 innovators together or a manager, innovator pair. But for the most part, you have to have all these characteristics, and I Unfortunately, I've recently seen some companies try to shortcut this and say, well, you don't really need owns characteristics. So it really the ones who succeed all pretty much look interesting.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: So if I were to peek inside the head of a typical executive and ask them about politics, they would it might sound something like this. It's a necessary evil. It hate it. It shouldn't be here, but I have to learn to do this just to get anything done here. If we were then crack open and listen to the heads inside the heads of a serial innovator, what might they be saying?
 
 Bruce Vojak: They might say pretty much
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: the same
 
 Bruce Vojak: thing in some respects because Because, again, their goal is to well, you know, they're there to serve all these other people. And while they maybe didn't use that phrase, mean, we think about it. They really are there to solve customer problems first and foremost. And but they do so in a way that also addresses management's concerns. They do so in a way that clearly, you know, addresses shareholder needs.
 
 And also their colleagues, people keep their jobs and succeed through things like this. So they remarkably and I don't wanna make them sound like fiction by saying all these things, but they really do address a lot of different needs by doing this. So you know, most of them most, but not all, don't necessarily come to it wanting to be involved in these political things, but they realize it is a necessity and its kind of an aside. I don't know if you've heard this before. Many of the people we interview were engineers, but you can tell when an engineer is an extrovert because they're looking at your shoes, though.
 
 It's I don't wanna I don't wanna say painful for some of these people, but it's not natural for many
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: of Gotcha. Gotcha. That is a great metaphor. Great. I have many more questions than we have time for.
 
 So I'm just gonna narrow down just a couple. Bruce, Talk to us about why you decided to work on no excuses innovation.
 
 Bruce Vojak: Sure. You know, going back for several years now, living in the Midwest, where they're a large number of small and medium sized companies. I've over time met with a lot of people in a lot of these companies, and many of them or like their way to say it are uncomfortable with investing in innovation. And by that, I don't mean huge projects. I mean, even simple asking simple questions many have done things that are unfortunately, have failed.
 
 Many are frustrated. Many just fear the whole idea. And so I began to get concerned increasingly concerned about local and regional economies, national economies. And as a quick aside, I've actually been in contact of people in Germany, and there's a whole group of of German companies called the Middletown that are experiencing some of these same patterns. And so I, with Walter Hurst, felt that we wanted to do something to help the owners, to help the management to help all the employees.
 
 I mean, everybody does affect the economy. And so the book is a different kind of book. It's something more of a guidebook. It's I'd say it's unique and that it's does not assume an audience that would be interested in an interview. For the very first chapter is addressing, you know, the question why innovate.
 
 And I've actually been speaking on that topic as much as anything else lately. Because it's a question that a lot of people ask. And so this is the this is the kind of book that go through the argument as to, you know, why should you do this to survive and thrive? And did not get stuck in a downward spiral of cost reduction is a strategy. And it's the kind of book that if you're in a company that is that there are pockets of people of resistance, buy a copy and give it to them.
 
 If you're working with the company when the owner isn't too sure about it, company to copy and give it to tell me. Right? Just read chapter 1.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Yeah. I love it. Yep. I think all of our listeners will value that to be able to convince people that innovation is worth it. So in addition to that book and serial innovators, what is another book that strategist should read?
 
 Bruce Vojak: You know, there was this great little book that I was assigned to read when I was in business school. The book's published in in 19 86. So by now, it's almost 40 years old. It's called strategies of competitive success by Robert Pitts and Charles Snow. It's a wily book.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Excellent.
 
 Bruce Vojak: And it's a little paper back. And it is the most condensed, powerful book I've read. And I believe in simplicity, and this book is, in the best sense, simple. Some maybe some examples are outdated, but I to me, that's the go to ID. Awesome.
 
 Great. Thank you.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: I am gonna get that book as well. So, Bruce, thank you so much for taking the time to be here with you for the for your dedication to activating and standing for serial innovators in the world, and thank you for spending some time to share some of this insights with Thank you to our guest. Thank you to our executive producer, Karina Reyes, our editor, Zach Ness, and the rest of the team. If you like what you heard, please follow, download, and subscribe. I'm your host, Kaihan Krippendorff. Thank you for listening.
 
 We'll catch you soon with another episode of Out Thinkers.