Conditional knowledge and debugging strategies help overcome creative endeavours’ costs: Can we use successful innovators’ tactics for innovation education?

Given that society depends on a steady supply of innovators to overcome challenges, innovation education efforts must be amplified to promote innovation skills among students. A key aspect of promoting innovation in context is understanding how and why innovators are motivated to innovate. However, even in the limited emerging literature on motivating innovation, there is a paucity of information on established innovators’ motivations for innovating. This two-phase, primarily qualitative study addresses this knowledge gap by investigating the strategies that innovators used to make their creative endeavours more likely, combining semi-structured interviews and a survey of Canadian innovators. Interviews were conducted with a diverse, multidisciplinary sample of 30 Canadian innovators which informed the development of the survey administered to a larger sample of 500 Canadian innovators. Participants reported costs of innovating and from their perspectives offered advice for aspiring innovators. Specifically, innovators detailed advice and approaches for aspiring innovators to maximize expectancies, maximize values, and proactively mitigate costs. This study calls for innovation education to focus on building capacity for developing innovators based on the strategies of successful innovators. These promotive and mitigating strategies are useful guides for educators, leaders, and of course for innovators themselves. Study results direct attention to approaches that should be integrated into programs designed to promote innovation across disciplines, organizations, and learning contexts.