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1. 00:02 Innovation requires several psychological traits, constructs and dynamic processes. In the absence of any one of these, innovation is literally impossible. That means that innovators in a way are freaks of nature or freaks of nurture. they somehow are able to combine these
2. 00:26 four sometimes mutually exclusive psychological demands or requirements and come up with something new. My name is San Batin. I’m the author of malignant self- loveve and narcissism revisited. I’m also a professor of psychology innovation. Innovation of course
3. 00:46 requires profound experience, expertise, the ability to somehow accumulate and amalgamate the state-of-the-art previous um innovations, the scientific background for the innovation. And so there’s a lot of learning, there’s a lot of irudition that goes
4. 01:08 into innovation. Actually, the process of applying for a patent absolutely demands proof and evidence of such awareness of a prior state-of-the-art. But expertise, learning, knowledge, irudition, awareness of previous innovations, acquaintance with the scientific fields
5. 01:34 involved in the innovation, all these are acquired. They are external. They are imported from the outside and theoretically almost anyone could reach this state. However, innovators have several psychological traits, constructs and processes which
6. 01:58 are literally unique to such people. Let’s start with something surprising. Humility. We all have this stereotype of the innovator as a megalomania, a Thomas Edison or a Nicolas Tesla or someone who believes that Yoshi is about to transform the world to reshape it. And
7. 02:24 so there’s a godlike attribution, a divinity or self-imputed divinity. Seems that many many innovators are grandiose and in this sense a bit narcissistic. At least this is the stereotype. But the truth is that innovators are humbled by nature. They feel that they are explorers and
8. 02:52 discoverers of a terrain that has been shaped and molded by millennia of natural processes on the one hand and previous thinking and scholarship on the other. That is a very humbling experience to find yourself embedded in such a landscape or to stand on the
9. 03:14 giants of shoulders shoulders of giants. So humility is a key feature in innovation. If you are not humble, you’re unlikely to perceive any deficiencies in your knowledge. You’re unlikely to be able to learn, to be able to improve. Humility is a precondition for
10. 03:39 self-improvement, personal growth and development. And innovation is the outcome of these processes. Real innovators, never mind how ostentatiously grandio deep inside are humble people. Next, a sense of wonder, curiosity, and open-mindedness.
11. 04:06 Open-mindedness is actually a factor in many personality theories. People are either open-minded or they’re close-minded. And this is a parameter. This is a dimension of personality. In, as I said, in many factor-based personality theories, innovators are invariably open-minded.
12. 04:28 And I mentioned curiosity. And in the case of innovators, curiosity is a lifespan feature. It’s lifelong. It never abates. It never ceases. It only increases. As the innovator accumulates knowledge, is exposed to other innovations, to the history of innovation, as the innovator
13. 04:52 develops a wide variety of life experiences, the curiosity of the innovator tends to increase not decrease. Whereas in most other people, curiosity is a phase in early childhood and perhaps adolescence and then it abates. It disappears. Not in the innovator.
14. 05:12 Curiosity in doing innovator is also coupled with a sense of the m miraculous, the wondrous. The innovator faces the universe with a kind of awe and shock even at the intricacies and the the subtleties of reality. The innovator innovator is trying to coax
15. 05:37 and cajul reality into surrendering its enigmatic features, its secrets. It is a bit like a romantic relationship where initially the partner is perceived as a kind of a mystical figure, something to be deciphered, an enigma. This is the relationship the innovator has with
16. 05:59 technology and with nature itself. a relationship of this is one big riddle. This is one huge puzzle. This is one undecodable enigma. And I’m going to do my best to find the answers to decipher this and to render it something useful, applicable, and something that would
17. 06:21 transform people’s lives. And finally, the last psychological feature of innovation is a synoptic view. The ability to connect things, to connect concepts, to connect prior knowledge, to speculate by establishing networks of connections, forming novel new ways of looking at
18. 06:49 things, by merely putting them together. This ability to form novel connections between concepts is at the heart of innovation. One could even generalize and say that most innovation has to do with the emergence of new concept which synerggetically and epiphenomenally
19. 07:10 emerge from prior concepts. It’s like taking here hydrogen and oxygen putting them together and coming up with water. That’s what the innovator does. Innovators consequently are not good businessmen. They are not good entrepreneurs because they’re aware of nuances. They
20. 07:32 always weigh multiple alternatives and they are cognizant of risks and dangers in the innovation process and later in its translation into business. In other words, innovators don’t have the tunnel vision that renders people good entrepreneurs and good businessmen.
21. 07:55 A good businessman business businessman needs to ignore subtleties and nuances. A good businessman is focused laser-like on a single alternative and a good businessman charges ahead regardless of risks and dangers. These are not the hallmarks and not the features of an
22. 08:15 innovator on the very contrary. And so what happens is usually an innovator comes with an innovation or an invention and then fails when he or she tries to implement the invention or the innovation to kind of convert it into a product or a service and then sell them.
23. 08:36 This is why an innovator or an inventor requires a good entrepreneur, a good businessman as a partner in order to derive the economic and financial benefits which are the inevitable side effects or byproducts of great innovation.